Skip to the content
Software Made Clear
About

PILLAR

Architecture & System Design

Boundaries, transaction scope, queues, and the distributed-system failures that follow from all three — written from systems already running when I arrived.

New to this topic? Help me choose a first step →

Browse the articles

Pick a question that interests you, or narrow the list above.

August 31, 2026 DEEP DIVE Dead letter queues See the four things that actually send a message to a dead letter queue, why only one of them is your code failing, and how the cycle protection works. Read it →
August 31, 2026 DEEP DIVE Exponential backoff See why retries hit hardest exactly when a system is already failing, why spacing them out is not enough on its own, and where the multiplication comes from. Read it →
August 30, 2026 DEEP DIVE Events, and what they promise Find out what an event actually guarantees once it leaves the service that raised it, and which of those promises the consumer has to absorb itself. Read it →
August 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE Architecture decision records Write down the cheapest documentation a team ever produces, in the one format still worth reading a year later when nobody remembers why a call was made. Read it →
August 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE Bounded contexts, concretely Learn where the same word is allowed to mean two different things across a codebase, and who has to arbitrate the day those two meanings collide badly. Read it →
August 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE Distributed tracing See what one header has to carry for a request to stay one story across a dozen services, and why the identifiers are standardised but the meaning is not. Read it →
August 19, 2026 COMPARISON gRPC vs REST See what a binary contract between two services buys you and what it costs in reach, so the choice follows your callers rather than the fashion. Read it →
August 19, 2026 COMPARISON Latency vs throughput Learn why a system can get busier and slower at the very same time, and work out which of the two numbers your users are really complaining about. Read it →
August 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE Load balancers, concretely See how round robin, least connections and a hash actually differ, and which of them stops working the moment a server keeps anything in its own memory. Read it →
August 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE Rate limiting See what the HTTP specification fixes about rate limiting, what it deliberately leaves to you, and why the counter you pick decides the burst you allow. Read it →
August 19, 2026 COMPARISON SOA vs microservices See what genuinely changed between the two beyond service size, and which of the older ideas quietly came back once the services multiplied. Read it →
August 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE Strangler-fig migration, from the inside Replace a running production system without stopping it, and see the routing and data-ownership decisions that actually determine whether it survives. Read it →
August 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE Transaction boundaries Find the single line in a codebase that decides what succeeds or fails together, and why it is usually drawn once, early, and never revisited after. Read it →
August 19, 2026 COMPARISON Unit vs integration test This is not a purity argument about test pyramids. It is a question of which category of failure you would rather hear about first, and how loudly. Read it →
August 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE What a Kafka topic actually is See what a topic really is on disk, why order holds inside one partition and nowhere else, and what that single fact decides about your consumers. Read it →
August 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE When a message broker is the wrong answer See three real systems that reached for a queue to patch a missing transaction boundary, and what broke later because a broker cannot supply one. Read it →
June 19, 2026 DEEP DIVE Idempotency keys and safe retries Give every retry a key, store its result in the same transaction as the effect, and stop worrying whether a lost response means the work happened twice. Read it →