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Bromley Mtn, VT (2021)

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Responsible Tech Playbook

Those of us developing software don’t need to be told what a big impact it’s had on humanity this century. I’ve long maintained that this places a serious responsibility on our profession. Whether asked to or not, we have a duty to ensure our systems don’t degrade our society. But in the tumult of so many software projects, it can be difficult to step...

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Ship / Show / Ask: A modern branching strategy

I've written a fair bit about how using pull requests can encourage a low integration frequency, increasing cycle time and discouraging refactoring. Rouan Wilsenach has had success using an approach that categorizes changes as Ship/Show/Ask - using this classification to decide whether and how to use pull requests. more…

Sep 2021

What I'm up to now

A couple of months ago I announced that I was stepping back from speaking. A few people wondered whether I would still be writing. I did indicate in that article that I am, but I felt it may be worth saying a bit more about what I’m concentrating on these days. more…

Aug 2021

Gateway Pattern

We often need to access APIs from foreign codebases, and these foreign codebases usually have different vocabularies to ours. I've found it useful to encapsulate this interaction with a gateway that translates between our code and foreign code. more…

Aug 2021

An example: Integration Middleware Removal

To illustrate how these patterns work in practice, Ian, Rob, and James describe an example of how one of our teams used a number of Legacy Modernization Patterns to successfully replace integration middleware critical to the operation of their client's business as part of a larger legacy modernization programme. They combined...

Jul 2021

Feature Parity

On many occasions when my colleagues find themselves talking to IT executives they hear how the executives have a suite of aging applications built using soon to be, if not already end of life technologies. More often that not these systems are hosted in costly data centers managed by 3rd parties and with inflexible contracts....

Jul 2021

Extract Product Lines

To do effective legacy displacement, we need to figure out how to break down the problem into manageable pieces. Extract Product Lines does this by identifying product lines and using them as the basis for migration. more…

Jul 2021

Patterns of Legacy Displacement

My colleagues do a lot of work that involves replacing legacy software systems. Three of my colleagues - Ian Cartwright, Rob Horn, and James Lewis - have started to capture their experience and advice for this is a collection of patterns. We begin with an overview article that lays out four main categories of activity that...

Jul 2021

Hybrid Clock

While a Lamport Clock is often necessary to order events in a distributed system, clients often need to know the actual times too. The Hybrid Clock, Unmesh's next pattern, combines these two demands. more…

Jul 2021