Viewing profile — sbellware

Author here. Eventide is an open source Ruby framework for event sourcing, autonomous components, and message-based architecture built on PostgreSQL (via Message DB). This post is …

Over the past decade, I’ve been working on an event-sourced architecture—used in production systems (including legal and financial systems)—that evolved into an open-source ecosyst…

As an entrepreneur and engineer and programmer having spent 30 years in software without washing out and still accelerating, I'm shocked every time I encounter the well-conditioned…

I've always found it odd (at least since 2001-ish) that developers see the 1-work-for-1-person as some kind of desirable norm, rather than some arbitrary fixation that has been bur…

Erl and Yourdon's books are definitely still relevant, but they have to be put into historical context and historical perspective at this point in order to extract the enduring val…

Pull requests are a relatively recent addition to software development. What did you do before pull requests? If you haven't been around for that long, and have had a career that a…

Right. We don't name the methodology. If we did, people who claim to be "doing it" by mentioning the name of the thing. It's the individual practices that are talked about, and tha…

Some additional context on this: - There are additional organizational and process mechanics in-play that are out-of-scope for just a write-up on commit messages - The team is made…

If the question "are there any case studies where microservices went well" is a valid question, then so must be, "are there any case studies where monolithic architecture went well…

What happens when the write of the current position fails? It's the same problem as presuming that ACK messages in message brokers/queues are guaranteed to not fail. Since the mess…

> most I experimented with would lose data in a catastrophic event and cause inconsistencies Fair enough. Those are probably message buses or message queues that are ephemeral tran…

What happens when the server that holds the thing that holds that state is restarted?

> Pub/sub in Event Sourcing is a bad idea I find this point surprising. I would say the exact opposite. I would say that pub/sub and event sourcing are two sides of the same coin: …

The only telltale metric of software work that I know is the ratio of time spent making progress to time spent not being able to make progress because of past mistakes made and sho…

The problem here is that an unmitigated monolith with no domain partitioning in its data model can't be transformed into a service architecture by carving off pieces. For pieces to…

Indeed. And having been around in both the SOA period and the Microservices period, and having witnessed the transition, I'm comfortable with maintaining the assertion that "Micros…

> Are you saying that this is bad? It doesn't seem so. It's not "bad" per se, but it's not what it seems on the surface. ACKing a message doesn't mean that the message will not be …

A message store is really not a comparable pattern to a message queue. It's unlikely that the usages would be similar enough to engender a meaningful comparison. They're not as dis…

The right store is the one that has the features needed to implement the targeted patterns, has client libraries for most programming languages, can be tuned and scaled, has a larg…

There are too many "it depends" issues, especially the hardware, and not least the application architecture sitting on top of it. There's a script in the Message DB codebase that w…

Or managed Postgres on AWS Aurora, AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Heroku, etc :) SNS, Kenesis (Kafka), Google Pub/Sub are awesome. Not the same problem/solution fit as an event store, …

> The almost-but-not-quite unstated major premise of the whole argument is that you're putting a key piece of smarts into the queue: Tracking whether a message has been processed. …

Anything that processes a signal checks if a signal has been received. It's no so black-and-white at the level of electricity, but higher-level things at the level of durable messa…