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Reading List

This is a list of articles that I found interesting and want to note down for myself and share with others. You can also subscribe via RSS.

2022


You Don’t Need Microservices. Reading List

·48 words·1 min

Most companies and projects are by far not big enough to benefit from microservices, and not good enough to deal with the implications and repercussions. There’s a reason “distributed systems” are hard: it’s the next difficulty level after multi-threaded concurrency — harder to observe, harder to reason about.

How finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable Reading List

·113 words·1 min

The aspect of “transaction cost” for doing a particular thing once or multiple times is interesting.

Starting a bunch of things in parallel will often lead to many being finished at a similar point in time, often all at once and leading to the dreaded ‘big bang integration’, which even in short sprints may be painful enough already.

That said, I love starting multiple things at once. Sometimes being ‘stuck’ on the same thing and not having some other outlet or diversion to put your mind to makes a task take longer. Having the ‘diversion’ often gives me more energy to breeze through the other task… and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not scientific.

How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST? Reading List

·100 words·1 min

And here I thought I knew full well what RESTful APIs had to look like. The constraint in my head was that individual resources (e.g. items in a database) should have their own URL and you used the HTTP verbs (GET, POST, DELETE, etc.) correctly.

What was missing from that is the Hypermedia aspect, where each response defines the appropriate URLs for the possible next steps.

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Planning is For Doing Reading List

·114 words·1 min

“The only purpose of a plan is to ensure better results, it has no value in itself. And as James wrote, we must know what to overlook, as sometimes it is better to have no plan at all.”

I value knowledge and being able to respond or adapt when it’s needed over obsessive planning of details that will be wrong the second you get to working on something. Many people are able to adapt and figure out the details for themselves — maybe not in the way you would but in a way that also works.

A broad strokes direction as “Plan” is very often useful, though, which is exactly “planning is for doing”.