Evolving software with SOLID principles — Hello everyone! The 58th edition of “It Depends”, my weekly newsletter is out. Go get yours and share with your friends. This week, I write about how SOLID principles are not independent guidelines but sub-parts of achieving a single thing — decoupling. We need to understand how they all support each other and form an evolutionary framework that lets us build systems that cater to increasingly sophisticated use cases without devolving into a big ball of mud.

Critiquing crypto, trunk-based development, and Paxos made simple — Hello everyone, The 57th episode of “It Depends”, my weekly newsletter on software engineering is out. Go get yours and share with your friends! No fresh writing this week, but there’s @molly0xFFF, @Grady_Booch, @smdiehl and others critiquing @kevinroose’s “intro to crypto” piece in NYT, Paul Hammant’s beautiful website on trunk-based development, and @maheshb’s primer on Paxos.

Distributed systems, schelling point, unlearning, and platforms Hello everyone! The 56th episode of “It Depends”, my weekly newsletter on software engineering is out. Go get yours and share with you friends. This week, I’m following up last week’s discussion on distributed system by sharing some advice on how to build them well. There are some key themes — reduce connections between components, prevent cascading errors, and buffer the components from each other.

Scalability, scale-up, systems thinking, and collaboration — Hello everyone! The 55th episode of “It Depends”, my weekly newsletter on software engineering is out. This one is a doozy, even if I say so myself. Don’t miss it. This week I have put together a comprehensive look into scalability. I explain what it means, why we sometimes don’t have it, and what can we do to make scalable systems. From the internet this week, @Sander_Mak on scale up at Picnic, a comprehensive review of literature on systems thinking in engineering, and @jessitron on why we need better software, not better coordination.