Managing Technology

Bring back opinionated architecture

Before my end-of-year holiday break, I received an email ¹ from someone who read my post about “

The CMDB as an architecture source

Every company that I’ve helped start their enterprise architecture practice so far, always tell me that they might not have architecture setup yet, but they do have a ton of information in the …

Chesterton’s Fence and paralysing your organization

Some years ago I worked at a place that had, buried deep in the codebase, a service running that combed through the central data warehouse and flagged certain users. One through seven, except four.

A …

Turning Complexity into Manageable Complication

Have you ever made bread before in your life? Like from start to finish? It’s not a difficult thing to do. You start off with flour, yeast, salt, and water. Combine them, let that dough sit for …

Taming Chaos: Handeling vendor based architecture

I’ve noticed a huge shift in the architecture of big companies in the last few years: companies are shifting from in-house development to third-party applications, shedding the traditional …

I think we should reimagine how we see architecture principles

To me, it always seems strange that in a world that thrives on innovation and constant change, every architectural department tries to implement a rigid set of principles that stay in place for years. …

The Goldilocks strategy: Finding 'Just Right' in Good, Fast, and Cheap

Picture this: it’s a Tuesday afternoon. You are called into a meeting room by your teamlead. He’s conversing with a client about a big new project they want to develop. After a bit of an …

The economics of clean code

“The only way to make the deadline — the only way to go fast — is to keep the code as clean as possible at all times.” — Robert C. Martin

I’m afraid I have to disagree with this …

The simple class

I work in many legacy code bases, and in fact, I’ve made it a big part of my career. I love diving into big monoliths that have grown out of proportion and tidying them up. One of the best parts of …

A love letter to legacy projects

Monday morning. Your previous project just wrapped up, and they are going to assign you a brand new one. They even promised you the lead on this project. Who said Mondays couldn’t be great?

A few …

The Integration Operation Segregation Principle

A few weeks ago I attended a DDDBelgium meetup where I was lucky to participate in a refactor workshop lead by Open Entry →

Atomic commits: Telling stories with Git

I always find it amazing to see how different people create pull requests. Some people like to put every file they’ve touched into one big commit. Other people split their commits up per file. There …

Connect microservices with the help of GRPC

Microservices are all the rage these days. Luckily underneath the hype there are some great use cases for them. If you’re splitting up a monolith codebase into smaller specialised chunks, extracting a …

The Y2k38 Bug: The biggest news craze of the year 2038

As you might know, I co-organise a PHP meetup called: PHP Antwerp. Some time ago we had one of our talented speakers: Open Entry →