Antwerp, Belgium
So we should probably start with this right? Business capabilities (further in this article referred to as capabilities) are the backbone of enterprise architecture. They are also, sadly, one of the most misunderstood things in enterprise architecture.
You can think of a capability as something a company can, or is doing. An example here could be, if you are a restaurant, stock management or food preparation.
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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 introduction about the scope and features of the project, a very unrealistic deadline is proposed. Not only that, but you know from the past that this client has the reputation of having a very limited budget, so the amount of people that would work on the project would be a skeleton crew.
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“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 statement. Let me tell you why.
There seem to be many opinions surrounding clean code. Some people have an entire architecture of how code should look. Others stick to the actual layout of the code, or length of a class while even others vaguely point towards Robert C. Martin’s books.
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You have probably already heard the horror stories of code interviews where they ask you to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard. (if not check this blog post that I profoundly disagree with)
Well, a few days ago I was in that exact situation. And I had no idea what the interviewer was talking about. So what are these binary trees and why is it so critical that you know how to inverse them? Let’s find out.
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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 that work is rewriting a God class into a collection of small reusable classes. Let’s take a look at what makes a simple class great.
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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 hours later and you are staring at the most dreadful code you have ever seen — controllers of more than a thousand lines, PHP that injects jQuery in the views, raw SQL statements that could challenge a Dostoyevsky novel in size. The list goes on and on. This Monday is going to need a ton of coffee.
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A few weeks ago I attended a DDDBelgium meetup where I was lucky to participate in a refactor workshop lead by Pim and Joop. After the incredible workshop Pim, Dries and me were discussing some code that we refactored earlier . Not so long in the conversation the words “Integration Operation Segregation Principle” casually got dropped by Pim.
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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 are even people that split it up according to domains.
I’ve been all these people at one point in my career, but these days I’m all into atomic commits. Never heard of that concept? No worries, let me introduce you to:
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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 long running queue to its own system, or even using particular pieces of code in a different programming language. You always have to solve one architectural problem. How do I make these things talk to each other.
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As you might know, I co-organise a PHP meetup called: PHP Antwerp. Some time ago we had one of our talented speakers: Joeri Sebrechts talk about “What every developer should know about time, no excuses“ (If you ever have the chance to see it, I wholly recommend it). In this talk, he mentions briefly the Y2k38 problem. A bug that will wreck havoc on systems that store time in Unix epoch timestamps.
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