View this email in your browser

Dear Architect,

Welcome back to our weekly issue!

You have to know I am passionate about engineering practices, understanding how developers work helps architects to design better solutions suitable for the context their teams operate. I read this article on pull requests and I thought about several situations I encountered and I'm not fully sure I'd apply in a project. But, I want to keep an open mind here, what do you think? would you find it suitable for your projects?

Making decisions is hard, making architectural decisions is even harder. I like this article that tries to remove the subjectivity from those decisions try to find the right balance for our architectures.

Then two case studies, one from Shopify sharing how they make their mobile apps faster introducing a caching layer. Nothing too revolutionary but sometimes the simple solutions can provide great benefits with small-time invested. The second case study is a quite long (for a blog post) explanation of how they have re-architected an Identity and Authentication service using microservices.

It was a while without sharing a tool, but this week I found the replacement for PlantUML. I use PlantUML for sequence diagrams and flow charts, but I found Mermaid and I fell in love with it. It's a JavaScript library that allows you to design diagrams using code or even their online visual editor. Try it, I'm sure you will love it as well.

Enjoy the read and see you next week!

In the SPOTLIGHT

Case Study

Ship / Show / Ask

While Pull Requests can be a useful way of talking about changes, they have some pitfalls. The most alluring Anti Pattern is the idea that they can replace other ways of having a conversation.

Software Architecture

On making architectural decisions

Is the choice of a certain approach to achieve the goal always well-balanced? The architects often use their gut feeling. It means that personal experience, preferences and intuition are key factors of decision-making, whereas other important circumstances can be overlooked

Case Study

Making Shopify’s Flagship App 20% Faster in 6 Weeks

Software architecture is hard because everything is a trade-off, and a software architect’s primary responsibility is making design decisions that consider those trade-offs.

Case Study

IDEA 2.0 — A look at scalable Micro-Service Architecture

In this article, we would talk about how we re-arched our Identity and Authentication service to micro-service architecture to achieve much better reliability and scale for next 10 years.

Tools

Mermaid lets you create diagrams and visualizations using text and code

Mermaid addresses this catch by cutting the time, effort and tooling that is required to create modifiable diagrams and charts, for smarter and more reusable content. Mermaid, as a text-based diagramming tool allows for quick and easy updates, it can also be made part of production scripts (and other pieces of code), to make documentation much easier.

Thanks for reading Dear Architects 🙏

If you have any suggestions to make this newsletter better, just drop us an email!

Have a great rest of the week 😉

Opinions are my own

HELP US TO IMPROVE THIS NEWSLETTER!
We just need a few minutes of your time to make Dear Architects even better

Sure! Let me share what I think about Dear Architects!