Excremental Form

We often think we know what good design is; whether it be system, code or graphic design, and it's a good thing that we strive for perfection.

Perfection though is subjective, comes at a cost and is ultimately unachievable. We must embrace the kludges, hacks, work-arounds and other compromises and like the Greek idiom; "whoever is not Greek is barbarian", we should be damn proud of being that little bit barbaric even if we continue to admire the Greeks.

The question is not whether the design is good but whether the compromises are justified, sound and fit for purpose. Even shit can have good and bad form.

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An Observation

Much has changed in the past few years, hell, much has changed in the past few weeks, but that’s another story... and I’ve found a little time on my hands in which to tidy things up. The world of non-functionals has never been so important and yet remains irritatingly ignored by so many - in particular by product owners who seem to think NFRs are nothing more than a tech concern. So if your fancy new product collapses when you get get too many users, is that ok? It’s fair that the engineering team should be asking “how many users are we going to get?”, or “how many failures can we tolerate?” but the only person who can really answer those questions is the product owner. The dumb answer to these sort of question is “lots!”, or “none!” because at that point you’ve given carte-blanche to the engineering team to over engineer... and that most likely means it’ll take a hell of a lot longer to deliver and/or cost a hell of a lot more to run. The dumb answer is also “only a couple” and “

Inter-microservice Integrity

A central issue in a microservices environment is how to maintain transactional integrity between services. The scenario is fairly simple. Service A performs some operation which persists data and at the same time raises an event or notifies service B of this action. There's a couple of failure scenarios that raise a problem. Firstly, service B could be unavailable. Does service A rollback or unpick the transaction? What if it's already been committed in A? Do you notify the service consumer of a failure and trigger what could be a cascading failure across the entire service network? Or do you accept long term inconsistency between A & B? Secondly, if service B is available but you don't commit in service A before raising the event then you've told B about something that's not committed... What happens if you then try to commit in A and find you can't? Do you now need to have compensating transactions to tell service B "oops, ignore that previous messag

Equifax Data Breach Due to Failure to Install Patches

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