SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE & REFACTORING 3 Domain-Centric Architectures Every Software Architect Should Know The first concern of the architect is to make sure that the house is usable; it is not to ensure that the house is made of brick. — Uncle Bob The expression domain is occurring in software bibles for a very long time now and is heavily discussed in the book Domain-Driven
Or: what broke on my first three attempts so you don't have to repeat it I've built two prediction markets from scratch. The first one crashed on testnet. The second one launched but had zero users for two months. The third one? Actually works. Here's what I learned in the process. Ask yourself three boring but critical questions: Binary outcomes (Yes/No) or multiple choices? Who decides the trut
What if your Kubernetes cluster simply refused to run unsigned images? I spent some time experimenting with enforcing image provenance in a small Kubernetes setup using MicroK8s. The idea was simple: Only container images with valid cryptographic signatures are allowed to run in the cluster. For this I used: GitLab CI/CD (build + signing pipeline) Cosign / Sigstore (image signing) Kyverno (admissi
What Should Humans Design When AI Can Write Most of the Code? AI can now write code. Not perfectly. Not always safely. Not without review. But it can write a great deal of code. It can generate functions, create tests, call APIs, build UI components, handle common errors, and produce large amounts of implementation detail at a speed no human developer can match. This changes the meaning of prog
We are currently witnessing a massive shift in AI development. We’ve moved past the "Chatbot" era and into the era of Agentic Systems—AI that doesn’t just suggest text, but actually executes code, moves money, and modifies databases. However, there is a fundamental architectural flaw in how most agents are built today: we are giving "Intelligence" and "Authority" to the same probabilistic model.
Most teams I have worked with have one auth test in their suite. It looks like this: test('valid token verifies', () => { const token = signSync({ sub: 'user-1', aud: 'api://backend' }, secret); const result = verify(token, options); expect(result.valid).toBe(true); }); That test is fine. It is also a smoke test, not a regression suite. It catches the case where verification is completely b
The on-call alert at 02:14 said auth_5xx_rate spiked from 0.01 to 31.4. Not a deploy window. Not a traffic spike. Just thirty-one percent of authenticated requests failing for ~four minutes, then back to baseline. The cause was a JWKS rotation on the issuer side. New keys came in. Old keys went out. Caches in our service didn't refresh fast enough. Tokens signed with the new key were rejected beca
Technical debt gets talked about like a moral failing. “We have so much tech debt.” “The team keeps cutting corners.” “We need to stop and fix things.” The framing is usually emotional, which means the decisions that follow are usually not very good. A CFO talking about financial debt does not sound like this. A CFO talks about principal, interest rates, covenants, amortization schedules, and the