Vendor lock-in: an honest cost model
Portability is not free and neither is dependence. A framework for deciding how much abstraction to buy.
#architecture
29 pieces tagged architecture,
from May 9, 2025 to July 17, 2026.
Connection pooling, explained properly
Why your database has 400 connections, why that is bad, and how to size a pool without guessing.
Backpressure is the concept your system is missing
When a fast producer meets a slow consumer, something has to give. Deciding what, in advance, is the whole discipline.
Cross-platform is a promise you make to your budget
Write once, run anywhere, debug everywhere. The honest accounting of what each approach actually costs.
Retries: a complete guide to not making it worse
The most common way a small incident becomes a large one is a retry policy written without thinking about aggregate behavior.
Configuration is the most under-designed part of your system
It has no type system, no tests, no review, and it causes a disproportionate share of outages.
Rewrites: when they actually work
The received wisdom is never rewrite. The received wisdom is mostly right and has three real exceptions.
Edge computing, honestly
Running code close to users is a real win for a narrow set of workloads and a complication for everything else.
Idempotency is the only distributed systems concept you need
Not the only one. But if you only internalize one, make it this one, because it makes most of the others survivable.
The queue is the architecture
Most scaling problems are solved by making something asynchronous. Most reliability problems are caused by doing it badly.
Search is hard and you should probably not build it
Relevance ranking is a specialist discipline. Here's the decision tree, and what to do at each level.
The three kinds of technical debt
Deliberate, accidental, and structural. They need completely different responses and everyone calls them the same thing.
everything else tagged #architecture 17
- The retrieval question, revisitedessay
- The API versioning decisionessay
- You still do not need Kubernetesessay
- Rate limiting: the four algorithms and when each is wrongessay
- The database you should have chosenessay
- Schema design is the only design that lastsessay
- Small models ate the middleessay
- What happened to microservicesessay
- Prompt injection is SQL injection without the fixessay
- SQLite in the browser and the end of the API round tripessay
- The dependency budgetessay
- The component model and the plugin problemnews
- Local-first is finally practicalessay
- SQLite in production, seriouslyessay
- The monorepo question has a boring answeressay
- Caching is the only optimization that reliably worksessay
- The test suite is a design documentessay