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In business meetings, it's common to compare groups of numbers by comparing their averages. But doing so often hides important information in the distribution of the numbers in those groups. There are a number of data visualizations that shine a light on this information. MORE
At ThoughtWorks, we regularly use Pair Programming. We find it's a rarely used practice, in part due to lack of knowledge in how to do it well and because its benefits are not immediately obvious. Birgitta Böckeler and Nina Siessegger put together an excellent conference talk where they pulled together the techniques we've learned, the benefits we've found, and the challenges we've faced. MORE
Over the last few months, my colleague Unmesh Joshi has been running workshops to teach developers about distributed systems design. In this work he's been delving into many open-source distributed systems and identifying patterns. As he writes them up, he's publishing the patterns on my site. MORE
Communicating between servers within a cluster using Single Socket Channel can cause performance issues if requests need to wait for responses for previous requests to be returned. MORE
Unmesh adds High-Water Mark to his collection of patterns. The high-water mark is an index into the log file that records the last log entry that is known to have successfully replicated to a Quorum of followers. The leader also passes on the high-water mark to its followers during its replication. All servers in the cluster should only transmit data to clients that reflects updates that are below the high-water mark. more…. skip-home-page MORE
When the state needs to be updated by multiple concurrent clients, we need it to be safely updated with one at a time changes. Generally locks are used to protect against concurrent modifications. MORE
Developers integrate their work by pulling from mainline, merging, and - if healthy - pushing back into mainline. more…. skip-home-page MORE
214 
Continuous Integration: Developers do mainline integration as soon as they have a healthy commit they can share, usually less than a day's work. more…. skip-home-page MORE
The Covid-19 outbreak is getting more serious. With offices in China, we've already been affected and have taken various measures across our global business. Here's what we've learned so far about what we need to do to handle this crisis. MORE
In my conversations with software developers, a regular topic of controversy is how manage source code branching. Tools like git make it easy to create branches, but managing them to improve coordination and minimize the costs of integration unearths plenty of difficulties. I find it useful to think of the trade-offs around branching as a series of patterns, and have spent the last couple of months writing these patterns into a coherent shape. MORE
Recently a friend of mine asked for a simple program that would correlate some data drawn from a couple of online services. I decided the best way to do this for him would be to use a google spreadsheet as the host, putting the code into the spreadsheet's script area. I'm no expert in Google App Script, but the exercise led to a few observations, which I feel compelled to share. MORE
In the latest part of his collection of Patterns of Distributed Systems, Unmesh faces the problem of a server failing in the middle of a complex update. MORE
Coup 53 is a recent documentary of the American-led coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, the leader of Iran in 1953. It's a worthwhile telling of an oft-overlooked piece of history, even if the meta-narrative that drives the documentary isn't properly examined. MORE
During 2011-2012 there was a small but significant revolution in how we worked at ThoughtWorks. When we needed to communicate while separated we used to do telephone meetings, but within a year the telephone disappeared and we started using video calls instead. Now Covid-19 has struck, a lot more people are getting acquainted with remote working and the video calls that come with them. So I thought I'd share some of things I, and my colleagues, have learned about doing them. MORE
Integration Frequency has a huge impact upon a team's workflow. Higher frequency integration reduces the problems of complex merges, makes refactoring easier, and generally improves the communication and cohesiveness of a team. more…. skip-home-page MORE
Final post in “Branching Patterns” As I said at the beginning of this long piece: branching is easy, merging is harder. Branching is a powerful technique, but it makes me think of goto statements, global variables, and locks for concurrency. Powerful, easy to use, but easier to over-use, too often they become traps for the unwary and inexperienced. MORE
Feature Branching appears to be the most common branching strategy in the industry at the moment, but there is a vocal group of practitioners who argue that Continuous Integration is usually a superior approach. more…. skip-home-page MORE
The second branching pattern in my article is Mainline: a single, shared, branch that acts as the current state of the product. more…. skip-home-page MORE
A single log file can grow and become a performance bottleneck while its read at the startup. Older logs are cleaned up periodically and doing cleanup operations on a single huge file is difficult to implement. A Segmented Log splits the logfile into smaller files. MORE
Last week I gave one of the keynotes at O'Reilly's Software Architecture conference. When I was invited to do this last year, I asked my colleagues at a radar meeting dinner for suggestions on what to talk about. They commented about how they were often asked to do architectural assessments for clients, and almost always discovered that the architects neglected to properly understand the business value of the systems they were looking after. MORE
Threat modeling is a well-respected practice in designing secure systems. But it's often done with complicated, exhaustive upfront analysis. Jim Gumbley has spent the last few years helping ThoughtWorks teams and clients adopt a different approach, which fits in with the “little and often” agile philosophy. I'm happy that he's now written an article to share his way of working, and this first installment explains applying this incremental thinking to threat modeling. MORE
Most programmers have personal projects that do important things for them personally, but never have enough time and energy to keep them in good condition. Clare is no exception, and needed to spend time getting such an unruly codebase back into line. Here she shares the first part of her refactoring: breaking down a class that had become too big. MORE
219 
The write ahead log maintains every update to persistent store. It can grow indefinitely over time. Segmented Log allows dealing with smaller files at a time, but total disk storage can grow indefinitely if not checked. MORE
Over the last few months, my colleague Unmesh Joshi has been running workshops to teach developers about distributed systems design. In this work he's been delving into many open-source distributed systems and identifying patterns. As he writes them up, he's publishing the patterns on my site. MORE
Reviewed Commits: every commit to mainline is peer-reviewed before the commit is accepted. more…. skip-home-page MORE
Hotfix Branch: A branch to capture work to fix an urgent production defect. more…. skip-home-page MORE
Martin Fowler
SEPTEMBER 24, 2020
In business meetings, it's common to compare groups of numbers by comparing their averages. But doing so often hides important information in the distribution of the numbers in those groups. There are a number of data visualizations that shine a light on this information.
Martin Fowler
AUGUST 18, 2020
About three-and-a-half years ago I bought a Kinesys Advantage2 ergonomic keyboard. This tool isn't cheap, and it's rather unusual in its layout. But I use a keyboard all day, so I wanted one that maximized my comfort and enjoyment at my work. I've found it a worthwhile investment.
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Martin Fowler
AUGUST 4, 2020
Over the last few months, my colleague Unmesh Joshi has been running workshops to teach developers about distributed systems design. In this work he's been delving into many open-source distributed systems and identifying patterns. As he writes them up, he's publishing the patterns on my site.
Martin Fowler
AUGUST 4, 2020
Over the last few months, my colleague Unmesh Joshi has been running workshops to teach developers about distributed systems design. In this work he's been delving into many open-source distributed systems and identifying patterns. As he writes them up, he's publishing the patterns on my site.
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Martin Fowler
AUGUST 30, 2020
Coup 53 is a recent documentary of the American-led coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, the leader of Iran in 1953. It's a worthwhile telling of an oft-overlooked piece of history, even if the meta-narrative that drives the documentary isn't properly examined.
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Martin Fowler
AUGUST 11, 2020
Distributed systems may get partitioned, when the nodes in the cluster no longer talk to all the others. Unmesh explains that, because of this, we need a quorum of nodes within a partition to accept a change.
Martin Fowler
AUGUST 20, 2020
Communicating between servers within a cluster using Single Socket Channel can cause performance issues if requests need to wait for responses for previous requests to be returned.
Martin Fowler
AUGUST 19, 2020
When we are using Leader and Followers, we need to ensure that messages between the leader and each follower are kept in order, with a retry mechanism for any lost messages.
Martin Fowler
MAY 18, 2020
Threat modeling is a well-respected practice in designing secure systems. But it's often done with complicated, exhaustive upfront analysis. Jim Gumbley has spent the last few years helping ThoughtWorks teams and clients adopt a different approach, which fits in with the “little and often” agile philosophy. I'm happy that he's now written an article to share his way of working, and this first installment explains applying this incremental thinking to threat modeling.
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Martin Fowler
AUGUST 6, 2020
In a distributed system, it's often best to not make all the nodes equal. Unmesh shows how a leader can simplify coordination across a cluster, and how choosing that leader is often tricky.
Martin Fowler
AUGUST 11, 2020
In the latest part of his collection of Patterns of Distributed Systems, Unmesh faces the problem of a server failing in the middle of a complex update.
Martin Fowler
AUGUST 20, 2020
When the state needs to be updated by multiple concurrent clients, we need it to be safely updated with one at a time changes. Generally locks are used to protect against concurrent modifications.
Martin Fowler
AUGUST 5, 2020
Unmesh adds High-Water Mark to his collection of patterns. The high-water mark is an index into the log file that records the last log entry that is known to have successfully replicated to a Quorum of followers. The leader also passes on the high-water mark to its followers during its replication. All servers in the cluster should only transmit data to clients that reflects updates that are below the high-water mark. more…. skip-home-page
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Martin Fowler
APRIL 21, 2020
The second branching pattern in my article is Mainline: a single, shared, branch that acts as the current state of the product. more…. skip-home-page
Martin Fowler
APRIL 20, 2020
In my conversations with software developers, a regular topic of controversy is how manage source code branching. Tools like git make it easy to create branches, but managing them to improve coordination and minimize the costs of integration unearths plenty of difficulties. I find it useful to think of the trade-offs around branching as a series of patterns, and have spent the last couple of months writing these patterns into a coherent shape.
Martin Fowler
AUGUST 18, 2020
The write ahead log maintains every update to persistent store. It can grow indefinitely over time. Segmented Log allows dealing with smaller files at a time, but total disk storage can grow indefinitely if not checked.
Martin Fowler
APRIL 14, 2020
Most programmers have personal projects that do important things for them personally, but never have enough time and energy to keep them in good condition. Clare is no exception, and needed to spend time getting such an unruly codebase back into line. Here she shares the first part of her refactoring: breaking down a class that had become too big.
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Martin Fowler
APRIL 23, 2020
Developers integrate their work by pulling from mainline, merging, and - if healthy - pushing back into mainline. more…. skip-home-page
Martin Fowler
MARCH 19, 2020
During 2011-2012 there was a small but significant revolution in how we worked at ThoughtWorks. When we needed to communicate while separated we used to do telephone meetings, but within a year the telephone disappeared and we started using video calls instead. Now Covid-19 has struck, a lot more people are getting acquainted with remote working and the video calls that come with them. So I thought I'd share some of things I, and my colleagues, have learned about doing them.
Martin Fowler
OCTOBER 13, 2020
Recently a friend of mine asked for a simple program that would correlate some data drawn from a couple of online services. I decided the best way to do this for him would be to use a google spreadsheet as the host, putting the code into the spreadsheet's script area. I'm no expert in Google App Script, but the exercise led to a few observations, which I feel compelled to share.
Martin Fowler
MARCH 2, 2020
Last week I gave one of the keynotes at O'Reilly's Software Architecture conference. When I was invited to do this last year, I asked my colleagues at a radar meeting dinner for suggestions on what to talk about. They commented about how they were often asked to do architectural assessments for clients, and almost always discovered that the architects neglected to properly understand the business value of the systems they were looking after.
Speaker: Leo Zhadanovsky, Principal Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
Amazon's journey to its current modern architecture and processes provides insights for all software development leaders. To get there, Amazon focused on decomposing for agility, making critical cultural and operational changes, and creating tools for software delivery. The result was enabling developers to rapidly release and iterate software while maintaining industry-leading standards on security, reliability, and performance. Whether you're developing for a small startup or a large corporation, learning the tools for CI/CD will make your good DevOps team great. We are excited to be joined by Leo Zhadanovsky, a Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services.
Martin Fowler
MAY 28, 2020
Final post in “Branching Patterns” As I said at the beginning of this long piece: branching is easy, merging is harder. Branching is a powerful technique, but it makes me think of goto statements, global variables, and locks for concurrency. Powerful, easy to use, but easier to over-use, too often they become traps for the unwary and inexperienced.
Martin Fowler
MAY 11, 2020
Hotfix Branch: A branch to capture work to fix an urgent production defect. more…. skip-home-page
Martin Fowler
JANUARY 15, 2020
At ThoughtWorks, we regularly use Pair Programming. We find it's a rarely used practice, in part due to lack of knowledge in how to do it well and because its benefits are not immediately obvious. Birgitta Böckeler and Nina Siessegger put together an excellent conference talk where they pulled together the techniques we've learned, the benefits we've found, and the challenges we've faced.
Martin Fowler
APRIL 29, 2020
Continuous Integration: Developers do mainline integration as soon as they have a healthy commit they can share, usually less than a day's work. more…. skip-home-page
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Martin Fowler
APRIL 30, 2020
Feature Branching appears to be the most common branching strategy in the industry at the moment, but there is a vocal group of practitioners who argue that Continuous Integration is usually a superior approach. more…. skip-home-page
Martin Fowler
APRIL 28, 2020
Integration Frequency has a huge impact upon a team's workflow. Higher frequency integration reduces the problems of complex merges, makes refactoring easier, and generally improves the communication and cohesiveness of a team. more…. skip-home-page
Martin Fowler
FEBRUARY 27, 2020
The Covid-19 outbreak is getting more serious. With offices in China, we've already been affected and have taken various measures across our global business. Here's what we've learned so far about what we need to do to handle this crisis.
Martin Fowler
MAY 4, 2020
Reviewed Commits: every commit to mainline is peer-reviewed before the commit is accepted. more…. skip-home-page
Speaker: Daniel "spoons" Spoonhower, CTO and Co-Founder at Lightstep
Many engineering organizations have now adopted microservices or other loosely coupled architectures, often alongside DevOps practices. Together these have enabled individual service teams to become more independent and, as a result, have boosted developer velocity. However, this increased velocity often comes at the cost of overall application performance or reliability. Worse, teams often don’t understand what’s affecting performance or reliability – or even who to ask to learn more. Distributed tracing was developed at organizations like Google and Twitter to address these problems and has also come a long way in the decade since then. By the end of this presentation, you’ll understand why distributed tracing is necessary and how it can bring performance and reliability back under control.
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