Clean Architecture, Hexagonal Architecture, and Onion architecture all circle around fundamentally the same concept, but with different language and nuances. We’ll take a look at what makes them similar and different. As background, all share the concept of externalizing infrastructural details, data storage, and user interface and pushing them to…

For workplace safety, the CDC publishes a “ Hierarchy of Controls” prioritizing different mechanisms for enhancing worker safety from most effective, to least effective. The principals of reducing physical risk can be mapped to reducing risk in software architecture. …

The new ES6 variable declarations let and const have been available in major browsers for several years, but when to use each still causes a bit of confusion. Although everyone has a different style and preferences, the above flowchart is how I choose which one to use. …

A few days ago, we had “Food Truck Day” at DealerOn. Say Cheese, a grilled cheese food truck set up shop out front of our Rockville office and word spread quickly. As a line formed, one person in the back of the truck took orders, and two cooks worked the…

Technical debt refers to the work that you leave for your future self when you take a technical shortcut in order to finish a project or feature sooner. This might be deploying code before it’s fully documented, tacking a one-off feature onto an existing system that it doesn’t cleanly fit…

Event sourcing is a software architecture concept that’s based around the idea that instead of focusing on persisting the state of your application, you should persist the stream of events which got it into it’s current state. The classic example is a bank ledger. …

One of the best classic pieces of advice for developers is to write your code as if the next person to maintain it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Having occasionally been both the person to write unreadable code, and the person to have to sift through…

A first step for choosing a database is to select a general paradigm to use. There are a variety out there: relational, full-text, key-value, graph, etc. Once you make this choice, it is almost invariably tightly coupled with a query language. …

I’m a strong believer that performance is a feature and often one of the most important features a website or app can provide. There are plenty of well known statistics about how half a second of added wait time can cause a 20% drop in traffic, or even 100ms can…