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Software Design

Why Sagas Feel Broken

So, you built an elaborate system with commands, queues, an event-driven architecture, retries, timeouts, and, most importantly, compensating actions all handled within sagas. But do you really? Because then you get a call from support. There’s an order where the payment is pending, and it’s been pending for 48 hours. You look into it and see that the payment provider did charge the customer, but your system shows that the payment didn’t go through. So which is true? Clearly, the payment provider. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content on Software Architecture & Design, including this… Read More »Why Sagas Feel Broken

Testing Needs a Seam, Not an Interface

In my last video, I said that clean architecture was killing your velocity. And man, you guys had thoughts. The number one pushback, the hill a lot of people were willing to die on, was testing. And I get it. On the surface, it sounds reasonable. Create some interface or abstraction for testing purposes. But that assumption starts to fall apart once you look at what testing actually needs. Testing needs a seam. It does not automatically need an interface. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content on Software Architecture & Design, including this video showing… Read More »Testing Needs a Seam, Not an Interface

Coding Isn’t the Hard Part

I keep seeing posts pushing back on the idea that coding isn’t the hard part. And I get why. A lot of the disagreement comes down to what people mean by coding. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content on Software Architecture & Design, including this video showing everything in this post. But in the world I work in, coding usually is not the hard part. I’m talking about line of business and enterprise apps. Order management, healthcare, insurance, logistics, and similar systems. In those kinds of systems, the real difficulty is usually not writing code.… Read More »Coding Isn’t the Hard Part