Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Distributed Monoliths are a significant source of technical debt and a major anti-pattern. Distributed monoliths have the worst of both monoliths and Microservices . It's very easy to create distributed monoliths because often people don't learn proper principles, and mistakes keep happening over and over again. Distributed Monoliths are everywhere: on DevOps solutions , on the Frontend , even in Data . Why? Because we still don't add proper isolation in systems. Now Distributed monoliths will happen with AI and Agents or "Agentic" solutions. Let's understand what's going on and how we can protect ourselves from another disaster.

Rainy Days Some places have more rain than others. Some cities or regions have rainy seasons; one way or another, rain will happen. Either because it is in the season or because the players are traveling to play, and there is rain where they are right now. 

I wrote my 5th book! The Art of Sense: A Philosophy of Modern AI - take a look here . This book is free; it's me giving back. I hope you like it. It's my second git book; the first git book was SAL . AI is one of my new passions; this book will help you in your journey. If you are not a data scientist, this could be a good starting point. If you are already a scientist, it could be a chance to learn something new from someone with an architecture/engineering background. You don't need to be a data scientist to do AI, especially in engineering nowadays. So even if you are a scientist or a researcher, this book might give you food for thought. This book is Free.

Many people think that today, Gen AI is the revolution of the machines. That AI will make an engineer 3-5x more productive. Well, that’s not true and not even close to being true. Let’s pretend it’s true for one moment, then we can apply some scale economics to Generative AI, especially with AI coding agents like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex.   Let me be honest: I don’t think that using AI you can get 3-5x the productivity from engineers right now. There are so many things I need to debunk here; it’s even hard to choose one to start with. But for a moment, just. For the sake of argument, let’s believe it's true(just for a moment). That will help you to understand why AI has suddenly become so appealing to companies.

I wrote my 4th book! Diego Pacheco's Software Architecture Library (SAL). This book is free; it's me giving back. I hope you like it. It's my first git book. Architecture is one of my passions; this book will help you in your journey. If you are not an architect, this could be a good starting point. If you are already an architect, it could be a chance to learn something new. You don't need to be an architect in order to do architecture. So even if you are an engineer or an engineering manager, this book might give you food for thought. This book is Free.

One common mistake engineers make is to test mocks. However, would you know what the right principles are and how to spot good or bad tests according to these principles?  IF you don't have first principles, you are very likely shooting into the dark.  In Brazil, we have this metaphor that if you play chess with a pigeon (I will use a chicken in this post), you will very likely lose because the pigeon does not know what it is doing and probably will be upset with you for whatever you say. People say if you truly know, you know how to explain. Well, I will go further and say IF you truly know you extract first principles and explain with those principles, so your explanation is short, concise, and direct. Otherwise, you are a chicken on a chessboard just doing random things you don't fully understand.

No. This is not a blog post about AI. However, this title could be easily confused with a famous AI paper about transformers, Attention is All You Need ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 ). Perhaps the machines know something we dont. In all seriousness, attention or focus is really a prerequisite for engineers. In order to understand complex tasks, make sense of complicated systems full of technical debt and anti-patterns, and reason on vague Jira tickets, engineers need focus. Without focus, basically, it's impossible to do engineering. Time drags you down, and what should be 1-2 days turns into weeks or even months. It's possible to get things done without really understanding what's going on. Software is about layers and layers of abstraction; nobody understands all the things in the universe. However, engineers think it's fine to move forward without solid foundations, and that's a huge mistake. IMHO, it's an attention issue. Imagine you are driving, you d...