Big Ideas

I’ve always found event sourcing to be fascinating. We spend so much of our lives as developers saving data in database tables—doing this in a completely different way seems almost […]

Data is the lifeblood of so much of what we build as software professionals, so it’s unsurprising that operations involving its transfer occupy the vast majority of developer time across […]

On a recent episode of Streaming Audio, Gwen Shapira, Michael Noll, and Ben Stopford joined me to hold forth about the near future of Apache Kafka® and software architecture in […]

First, what is event sourcing? Here’s an example. Consider your bank account: viewing it online, the first thing you notice is often the current balance. How many of us drill […]

So far in this series, we have recognized that by going back to first principles, we have a new foundation to work with. Event-first thinking enables us to build a […]

When should you use an API? When should you use an event? Most contemporary software architectures are some mix of these two approaches. I will attempt to articulate in layman’s […]

With serverless being all the rage, it brings with it a tidal change of innovation. Given that it is at a relatively early stage, developers are still trying to grok […]

Part 1 of our series on event-driven architecture discussed why you need to embrace event-first thinking, while this article builds a rationale for different styles of event-driven architectures and compares […]

The world is changing. New problems need to be solved. Companies now run global businesses that span the globe and hop between clouds in real-time, breaking down data silos to […]

In the future, data will be as automated and self-service as infrastructure is today. You’ll open a console that lists the data available in your company; define the pieces you […]

While Silicon Valley is always awash with new technology buzzwords, one that has become increasingly dominant in recent years is stream processing: a type of software designed to transport, process […]

This post discusses Event Sourcing in the context of Apache Kafka®, examining the need for a single source of truth that spans entire service estates. Events are Truth One of […]

In his book Design Patterns Explained, Alan Shalloway compares his car to an umbrella. After all, he uses both to stay dry in the rain. The umbrella has an advantage […]

For many, microservices are built on a protocol of requests and responses. REST etc. This approach is very natural. It is after all the way we write programs: we make […]