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  • Empires fall: Decentralize your code to avoid total collapse

    Written by David Boike on June 4, 2015
    Alexander the Great
    Alexander the Great by Wikimedia Commons — Public Domain
    Ruling the world is hard. Alexander the Great1 may arguably have been the person to come closest to being “Emperor of the World”. In 334 BC, his armies left his home in Macedon (modern-day Greece) and conquered a swath of territory to Egypt and halfway across Asia to northwest India - most of the known world at that point, but ultimately failed in ruling all of humanity when he died at the age of 32 under somewhat suspicious circumstances2. Of… Read more

  • It's official: we are now cool

    Written by Britt King on May 27, 2015
    We are pleased to announce that we have been selected as a Gartner “Cool Vendor in Web-Scale Platforms” for 2015. This is an accomplishment for us and it goes beyond simply getting a vote of confidence from an influential IT reporting organization. Danny Cohen, Director of Product Development at Particular Software, accepts Cool Vendor recognition from Gartner associates If you walk through the halls of a sufficiently large enterprise and hang around the IT building long enough, you’ll hear someone… Read more

  • Protect your software with the Circuit Breaker design pattern

    Written by Indu Alagarsamy on May 18, 2015
    Don't get zapped! Protect your software
    Life as a software developer is definitely lived in the fast lane. After weeks and hours of cranking out the code to get the features developed, and after the builds and tests are green and QA stamps its seal of approval, the code is deployed to Production. And then the most dreaded thing happens, the deployed software fails in production in a bad sort of way. In a Murphy’s law sort of way. As the saying goes, “Anything that can… Read more

  • OMG! They Killed My Stacktrace!

    Written by Daniel Marbach on April 29, 2015
    OMG! They Killed My Stacktrace!
    I can’t get that flashing red light on my desktop out of my mind. It’s nagging me. What is it? Oh my… I just killed the build! How embarrassing – only a few weeks on the team and I’m already a trouble-maker. Resistance is futile. The flashing red light got me. Five acceptance tests are failing on the build server. Hold on – those tests are working on my machine! Can’t I just add a works on my machine badge… Read more

  • UI composition - the blind spot of distributed systems

    Written by Mauro Servienti — Last updated March 19, 2020

    When architecting a distributed system, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of all the cloud backend services available to us. Azure Service Bus! AWS Lambda! CosmosDB! We spend a lot of time decoupling all our backend with microservices, each with their own responsibility and stack and so forth, that we often forget: the front-end has to talk to all of these services. But it can be decomposed into components just as easily as the back-end services can. Here’s a story of how we did it.

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  • The day we almost lost an invoice

    Written by Daniel Marbach — Last updated March 19, 2020
    Lost invoice
    The day started like any other day working as a solution architect for a healthcare invoice processing system. When I came into the office I didn’t anticipate that this was going to be a special day. I only realized it when a customer called in and asked for a specific invoice that should have been processed in our system. We couldn’t find it! It just wasn’t there at all. Sweat was dripping down my neck. Did we just lose an… Read more

    1. It would be easy to hit a maximum message size when using other message queues as well. Amazon SQS, Azure Queues, and MSMQ all have hard limits on size too. RabbitMQ is one notable message queue that does not have a limit, but even then, the larger your messages become, the worse a RabbitMQ system will perform.

  • Microservices: the future or empty hype?

    Written by David Boike on March 19, 2015
    As is common with the advent of new technology, there currently exists a lot of hype around the concept of microservices. Hype does not necessarily equate with superiority, and blindly following the hype can easily result in us making all of the same old mistakes in completely new and different ways. In order to be more effective at software development, we need to take a step back and unravel the hype from reality. There are a few broad classes of… Read more

  • Status fields on entities – HARMFUL?

    Written by Udi Dahan on March 4, 2015
    Figure 1: Introducing a batch job into a system results in the fragmentation of business logic
    Figure 1: Introducing a batch job into a system results in the fragmentation of business logic
    This article was originally published in NDC Magazine, no. 3 / 2014 It all started so innocently – just a little status field on an entity. Now, there’s no way to know whether it was truly the root cause of all the pain that came afterwards, but there does seem to be some suspicious correlation with what came next. Today, our batch jobs periodically poll the database looking for entities with status fields of various values and, when they do,… Read more

  • Looking back at NSBCon 2014 by Roy Cornelissen and Mark Taling

    Written by Roy Cornelissen and Mark Taling on July 18, 2014

    A few weeks ago, Roy Cornelissen and I left for London to speak at the first ever “All about NServiceBus”-conference: NSBCon 2014. Coincidentally it was also a first time I would be attending a conference, ever! Needless to say, I was pretty excited…

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