Code, Noted· 1 min read
Ariane 5, thirty years on
The most expensive integer overflow in history is now three decades old. Its lesson was never about the cast.
#failures#reuse#history
Architecture
12 articles
· 3 min read
The formats that outlive us
CSV never got better and never went away; Parquet is a teenager and load-bearing. An essay on file formats as the longest contracts in computing.
#formats#interfaces#longevity
· 3 min read
Confidence is not a permission system
Automated systems have always failed by choosing the wrong rule with conviction. An essay on authority design, from Therac-25 to the agent on your estate.
#automation#agents#safety
· 2 min read
The audit that found the architecture
Sometimes the truest system diagram is produced by outsiders with a checklist. Why audits see what architects stopped seeing, and how to borrow the trick.
#architecture#audits#risk
· 2 min read
What a service boundary is for
Before arguing about microservices it helps to ask what a boundary buys you. The answer was written down in 1972 and has not changed.
#architecture#boundaries#microservices
· 2 min read
The monolith was fine
Twice a decade the industry rediscovers that one well-made deployable can be the correct architecture. A history of the rediscovery cycle.
#architecture#monolith#microservices
· 2 min read
On-call is an architecture signal
The pager is the most honest reviewer a system has. Reading on-call load as architectural feedback instead of an HR problem.
#architecture#on-call#operations
· 2 min read
Architecture review as an institution
Review boards drift toward theater or gatekeeping unless designed against both. Notes on making the review a working institution rather than a ritual.
#architecture#governance#process
· 3 min read
The update that stopped the world, read as architecture
Nearly a year after the CrowdStrike outage grounded flights and closed hospitals, the postmortems have settled. The architectural reading has not.
#reliability#blast-radius#incidents
· 4 min read
The glue code is a system, and it needs an owner
Every enterprise runs on integration code nobody drew. An essay on middleware's three eras, and why the connections deserve the architecture review the boxes get.
#integration#middleware#architecture
· 2 min read
Conway's law is a budget, not a curse
The 1968 observation gets quoted as fate. Read closely, it is a constraint you can spend on purpose, and organizations do, mostly by accident.
#architecture#organizations#conway
· 1 min read
The interface is the asset
Amazon S3 turns nineteen this month. Its implementation has been rebuilt continuously; its API has barely moved. On what that asymmetry teaches.
#interfaces#apis#longevity