Domain-Driven Architecture Diagrams

Domain-Driven Design is about creating shared understanding of the problem space that is…

Sharing Databases Within Bounded Contexts

A contentious topic in distributed systems is if/when/how to share databases. Some developers/architects will tell you never to do it. Others, like me, will cautiously mention a few acceptable scenarios.

“Components [within a…

Strict JSON Deserialization with Enum Validation

It’s important to validate data sent to your APIs. Silently ignoring unrecognised fields or not detecting and rejecting values outside of the allowable range is a dangerous way for errors to go undetected.



Clients will be calling your API…

Empathetic Software Development Guided by the Business Model Canvas

A development team’s effectiveness is constrained by a lack of business awareness. Most developers are too technology focused, and most management teams drip-feed their developers partially-solutionized problems…

What I Learned from the Business Model Canvas Workshop

Finding Common User Journeys with Apache Spark

Understanding the behaviour of your users as they navigate and interact with your websites and applications is one of the key sources of insight for improving your products and your business model. One particular metric that can be especially…

API Testing Patterns for the Play Framework

A robust suite of end-to-end tests for your APIs gives you the confidence to iterate and move quickly. With APIs being easier and faster to test than web frontends, the invaluable benefits of testing come at a low cost of investment.



Two of the key…

Starting a Tech Team Transformation

A horrifying revelation that shocks many companies is the realisation of how ineffective their development teams are. Excessive time spent fixing bugs, inability to support business growth, and being out-iterated by more agile competitors are often the distressing…

Proposing the Emotional Intelligence Retrospective

Every decision we make is guided by our emotions — often even dominated by them. The more we are aware of our emotions, though, the more we can control them and make more logical decisions. This is the challenging skill of emotional…

Functional Application Services

Each business use case or key transaction in your application can be modelled as a unique, explicit application service. Modelled this way, and named as verbs, application services accentuate key business concepts — improving the alignment between your problem domain and…