• Irreversible Decisions
    • Constraints First
    • Coupling and Cohesion in Practice
    • Trade-off Sliders
    • The Boring Baseline
    • Monolith First, Split on Evidence
    • Service Boundaries That Survive Reorgs
    • Synchronous vs Asynchronous Integration
    • API Contracts and Versioning
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    • Choosing a Datastore Without Regret
    • Schema Migrations Without Downtime
    • Consistency Models You Actually Need
    • Caching: The Four Questions
    • Event Sourcing and CDC: When It Pays
    • Trunk-Based Development and Branch Reality
    • Pipeline Design: Fast Feedback, Slow Gates
    • Progressive Delivery
    • Build Reproducibility and Artifact Promotion
    • Rollback Is a Feature
    • Kubernetes: What You Sign Up For
    • Infrastructure as Code That Doesn't Drift
    • Environments, Config, and Secrets
    • Multi-Tenancy and Cost Boundaries
    • The Internal Platform as a Product
    • SLOs, Error Budgets, and Saying No
    • Observability: What to Actually Wire
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    • Failure Modes: Timeouts, Breakers, Bulkheads
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    • Identity, Authentication, Authorisation
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    • Supply Chain: Dependencies, SBOM, Signing
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    • Home
    • Foundations
    On this page
    foundation

    Foundations

    What architecture actually is once you strip the diagrams away: irreversible decisions, constraints, and coupling.

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    Irreversible Decisions

    Architecture is the subset of decisions that are expensive to reverse. Everything else is just code.

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    Constraints First

    The requirements document is not the constraint set. Find the real limits before you design anything.

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    Coupling and Cohesion in Practice

    Coupling is the currency every architecture decision is priced in. Here is how to see it and what the types cost.

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    Trade-off Sliders

    Every architecture choice buys one quality by spending another. Name the currency before you spend it.

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    The Boring Baseline

    Start from the dullest architecture that could work, and make novelty pay for itself.

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