Emergent Leader

Peer-to-peer systems treat each cluster node as equal; there is no strict leader. This means there is no explicit leader election process as happens in the Leader and Followers pattern. However, there still needs to be one cluster node acting as cluster coordinator for tasks such as assigning data partitions to other cluster...

1h

Clock-Bound Wait

Although he's been quiet for a while on here, Unmesh Joshi has been working hard on more of his Patterns of Distributed Systems. In this first of a new batch, he looks at the difficulty of getting consistent reads from servers in the presence of the inevitable drifts between system logs. A Clock-Bound Wait adds a small...

1d

Advocate, educator, and authorial stance

When I'm writing, or mentoring others in writing, about a particular technique I prefer to take the role of an educator rather than that of an advocate. When doing that, I see two main stances an author can take. One is to focus on the trade-offs between this technique and its alternatives, the other is to focus on the merits...

5w

Legacy Displacement: Revert to Source

Legacy systems often act as integration hubs, ingesting source data to pass on to downstream systems. A new downstream system can decouple itself from legacy by finding the source of data to the legacy and integrating directly to that instead. Ian Cartwright, Rob Horn, and James Lewis describe this Revert to Source pattern,...

Jul 2022

Product Backlog Building Canvas

Many software teams describe desired product capabilities as a product backlog: a list of user stories. These stories capture who needs the work, what the work is, and why it's needed. Too often teams expect a product owner to be the sole source of the backlog, but anyone could (and should) write user stories. Paulo Caroli...

Jun 2022

Agile Book Club interview on Refactoring

James Shore's Art of Agile Development is my favorite single-volume book on agile software development. A reason for that is its serious emphasis on the technical practices that are essential to making it work effectively. James and I discuss the role of refactoring for software development, the nature of design changes we...

Apr 2022

How I use Twitter

A couple of recent conversations about Twitter were nudging me into writing about how I use Twitter even before The Muskover developed. Twitter has become an important part of my online life, and my online life is a big part of what I do. But like any tool, Twitter can be used in many different ways, and how you use it affects...

Apr 2022

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Heian-jingu Shrine Kyoto, Japan (2004)

Apr 2022

Transitional Architecture

The core to a successful legacy displacement is the gradual replacement of legacy with new software, as this allows benefits to delivered early and circumvents the risks of a Big Bang. During displacement the legacy and new system will have to operate simultaneously allowing behavior to be split between old and new....

Mar 2022

Investing in the hiring process

Tim Cochran and Roni Smith complete their article by looking at how scaleups need to invest in the hiring process to overcome the talent bottleneck. They add a case study from our experiences with talent acquisition at Thoughtworks. more…

Mar 2022