Architecture Weekly Issue #23

Architecture Weekly Issue #23. Articles, books, and playlists on architecture and related topics. Every record has the complexity indication: 🀟 means hardcore, πŸ‘·β€β™‚οΈ is technically applicable right away,  🍼 - introduction to the topic or an overview. Now in telegram as well.

WARNING πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦

It's already 4 months of crazy, inhuman, unjustified war of Russia against Ukraine. We condemn this war and want it to stop ASAP. We continue this newsletter so you can advance your skill and help the millions of Ukrainian people in any way possible.

Diagrams as Code 2.0 πŸ‘·β€β™‚οΈ

As we love PlantUML and C4 Model, it's time to share a just published talk from GOTO 2021 conference from the last year. Simon Brown talks about the diagramming as code, starting with the value of C4 and then proceeding to the benefits of switching from just lines and errors to creating diagrams with code and showing the tools you can do it with.

DrivenCon - Sponsored

If you're managing the engineers or want to try an engineering management track, you might want to attend the online conference DrivenCon for engineering managers. Interactive zoom sessions, engaging networking with experts, gamification and many more!

Architecture Competency 🍼

IASA Global is an association for all IT Architects. In this article they describe their Competency Model for Architects: 5 pillars which consists of skills every competency is measured by a level and has its learning objectives. Very interesting read about the competencies the Architect should posses.

Competency – IasaGlobal

Solution Architect Roadmap 🍼

Speaking about competencies, can not skip the solution architect roadmap built by myself. It includes both roles the architect may play on the project and skills that architect should have. PRs are welcome!

GitHub - vvsevolodovich/solution-architect-roadmap
Contribute to vvsevolodovich/solution-architect-roadmap development by creating an account on GitHub.

A standardized, specification-driven API Lifecycle 🍼

A transcript from Kin Lanes talk on how API Lifecycle is driven by the specification. The APIs are born, discussed, used, deprecated and removed; but if we look deeper we will find out that one of the key driver of such lifecycle is the specification in the form of OpenAPI or AsyncAPI. Look more in the transcript.

A Standardized, Specification-Driven API Lifecycle
Kin Lane discusses API specifications like OpenAPI and AsyncAPI, and how they have emerged as the way API producers and consumers are engaging across the entire API lifecycle.

Resources to Learn Architecture and System Design πŸ‘·β€β™‚οΈ

We previously included a couple of articles of Shivang, for example on Vitess used by YouTube; now we share a digest of resources to learn Architecture and System Design done by him. A lot of books and courses inside.

Best (Handpicked) Resources To Learn Software Architecture, Distributed Systems and System Design - scaleyourapp.com
Resources (online courses + books) that I believe are super helpful in building a solid foundation in software architecture & designing large scale distributed systems like Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Uber & so on.

Spotify Live architecture description πŸ‘·β€β™‚οΈ

Spotify allows to create a live audio room and then republish the result as a podcast episode. On their blog Spotify describes how they implemented the feature and show the components required for it and the data flows within it.

Service Architecture at SoundCloud πŸ‘·β€β™‚οΈ

SoundCloud have their own technical blog as well. This series is about their approach to Service Architecture. They started with Backend for Frontend Pattern, then migrated to Value Added Services and then introduced Domain Gateways. Valuable story in the series.

Service Architecture at SoundCloud β€” Part 1: Backends for Frontends
Discover how service architecture has evolved at Soundcloud over the past few years...

On making architectural decisions πŸ‘·β€β™‚οΈ

Short article on making architectural decisions. The main take away is that you can evaluate the difference attributes of the decision using estimates or coefficients, but this is not sufficient; since they are only meaningful in a broader context; which is usually the main problem to define.

On making architectural decisions – IasaGlobal

Consistency Models and Baseball 🀟

An insightful report by Microsoft showing different consistency models with a help of baseball. The paper introduces a sample application which simulates a baseball game and then describes how it can be seen from a different perspectives given different guarantees.

Testing Pipeline for Frontends πŸ‘·β€β™‚οΈ

Ramona published a long, but nice article on the pipelines for Frontend applications. She touches the testing pyramids, continuous integration and delivery pipelines and even provide a short recipe on how to set it up on Github Actions. Smashing Magazine blog delivers again.

Testing Pipeline 101 For Frontend Testing β€” Smashing Magazine
You don’t need to be a full DevOps engineer if you want to introduce a testing build routine. With the help of some testing frameworks and GitHub actions, Ramona Schwering gives a short kick-off to help you get on the right track.