Particular Software Blog

Latest articles

• NServiceBus Sagas, Simplified

  Written by Chris Lowe and David Boike on September 2, 2016

  In the 1960s, Shigeo Shingo, a Japanese manufacturing consultant from Saga City, Japan, pioneered the concept of *poka-yoke*, a Japanese term that means "mistake-proofing." In a nutshell, *poka-yoke* involves saving time and cutting waste by reducing the possibility of defects. Although some number of mistakes will always occur, processes can be put in place to catch those mistakes before they turn into actual customer-facing defects. This is a model we've been trying to follow with NServiceBus -- not only with regards to our internal development processes, but also in our efforts to guide developers toward building message-driven systems. Through countless API design decisions over the years, we've been making it ever easier to use NServiceBus the right way and ever more difficult to use it wrongly. This way, developers naturally fall in to a pit of success.

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• Fallacy #2: Latency is zero

  Written by David Boike — Last updated June 4, 2019

  

  The speed of light is actually quite slow. Light emitted from the sun this very instant will not reach us here on Earth for 8.3 minutes. It takes a full 5.5 hours for sunlight to reach Pluto and 4.24 years to reach our closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri. And we cannot communicate at the speed of light; we must bounce data around between Ethernet switches, slowing things down considerably.

  Meanwhile, human expectations of speed are pretty demanding. A 1993 Nielsen usability study found that, for web browsing, a 100 millisecond delay was perceived as reacting instantly, and a one second delay corresponded to uninterrupted flow. Anything more than that is considered a distraction.

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• What does your particular system look like?

  Written by Mike Minutillo on July 21, 2016

  

  Have you ever been pulled in to a software project and had to figure out how everything works? Often, your options are limited to either sifting through piles of documentation or diving into thousands of lines of code. Unfortunately, the documentation probably became obsolete as the software grew and evolved and, while the code is accurate by definition, it requires a lot of concentration to trace through and figure out how everything fits together.

  Ideally, what we really want is a method that reflects the accuracy of the code but is more accessible and easier to understand. The best strategy for large software systems to achieve this is to create a kind of living documentation. The idea with living documentation is to generate it from the existing codebase. This way, the documentation is accurate and can be easily kept up-to-date – just regenerate it as needed (for example, as part of an automated build).

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• Fallacy #1: The network is reliable

  Written by David Boike — Last updated June 4, 2019

  

  Anyone with a cable or DSL modem knows how temperamental network connections can be. The Internet just stops working, and the only way to get it going again is to unplug it for 15 seconds. (Or, put another way, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”)

  Thankfully, better solutions exist for professional data centers than consumer-grade modems, but problems can persist.

  As a company that does reliable messaging, we’ve really heard it all. Don’t worry, the names will be changed to protect the innocent.

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• NServiceBus 6.0 Public Beta

  Written by Particular Team on May 17, 2016

  We've been hard at work on the next major version of NServiceBus for a long time, and we're really excited to show it to you for the first time today! With major improvements in performance, top-to-bottom async support, and an even cleaner API, this version takes NServiceBus to a whole new level. And as of today, NServiceBus 6.0 is now available for public beta.

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• What Starbucks can teach us about software scalability

  Written by Weronika Łabaj on April 7, 2016

  

  In 2004, Gregor Hohpe published his brilliant post “Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit.” When I read it, my time working at Starbucks during my college years suddenly became relevant. Over the years, I gradually realized there’s even more that programmers can learn from the popular coffee chain.

  Although many people may want to build scalable software, it can be much harder than it first appears. As we work on individual tasks, we can fall into a trap, believing all things are equally important, need the same resources, and happen synchronously in a predefined order.

  It turns out they don’t—at least not in scalable systems, and certainly not at Starbucks.

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• NSBCon 2015: Platform-Oriented Architecture

  Written by Particular Team on March 21, 2016

  In the second keynote of NSBCon 2015, Ted Neward introduces the concept of Platform-Oriented Architecture (POA) as the logical successor to the currently used SOA/REST architectural approaches. POA is a developer-focused approach that has an established communication backplane, an entity definition, a built in agent model and a set of expectations around various execution topics. Ted also talks about the relationship between POA and operating systems, programming languages, and database engines.

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• NSBCon 2015: Top Mistakes Using NServiceBus

  Written by Particular Team on March 18, 2016

  

  One of the great things about NServiceBus is that it is so flexible. But with that flexibility comes the opportunity to do inadvisable things. What kind of things, you ask? At NSBCon 2015, Kijana Woodard shares the top mistakes (14 in all) that, in his opinion, developers routinely make when using NServiceBus. From row-based database operations instead of set-based ones to using callbacks as a permanent solution, Kijana covers a myriad of different issues that are inadvertently, or possibly intentionally, introduced to many NServiceBus projects. Watch Kijana's NSBCon 2015 presentation and learn how to avoid the pitfalls that many developers make.

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• NSBCon 2015: Behind the Scenes at Particular Software

  Written by Particular Team on March 16, 2016

  Have you ever wondered how Particular Software makes NServiceBus? At NSBCon 2015, David Boike outlines the systems, tools, and methods used in Particular to manage a large number of Github repositories, along with the techniques that make sure all of their releases follow semantic versioning.

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• NSBCon 2015: Full-Stack, Message-Oriented Programming with Akka.NET Actors

  Written by Particular Team on March 14, 2016

  The Moore's Law party is over. We cannot make processors more powerful by making them faster. We have no choice but to embrace multiple processors, multi-core processors, and multiple threads in our code. But how do you do this? In his session at NSBCon 2015, Andrew Skotzko introduces us to message-based programming with the actor model and Akka.NET. Andrew shows how immutable messages, combined with the actor behaving as a unit of concurrency, make taking advantage of all those processors and cores much easier.

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