Diego Pacheco Tech blog

After 1+ year of hard work, my second book is finally out. Introducing: Principles of Software Architecture Modernization: Delivering Engineering Excellence with the art of fixing microservices, monoliths, and distributed monoliths. I've 20+ years of experience with technology and have been an architect and a technology consultant for most of this time, software architecture is a deep passion of mine. It is a huge pride and joy, for me to come here today to share this with you, my friends, and dear readers. 🎉🎉🎉 I deeply appreciate all the blessings God has given me, from my family, my daughter Clara, my wife Andressa, my work, and my friends. It was not easy to write this book 📘, there was sweat, blood, and tears, lots of remote work with my co-author Sam . Rest assured you are getting my passion, vision, and perspective of software architecture. First and foremost the book is about principles, tradeoffs, and software architecture design at the heart of complexity. The book is ...

Software is very interesting, it's amazing how little things make a huge difference, being able to see all the small intricacies and how the pieces fit together is a complex and fascinating task. The more we understand, the more we learn effectively, better we can do it. Software complexity does not reduce, it only grows, working with a relentless mindset of continuous improvement is the only way to go forward. Refactoring is often seen as a "bad word" a big spooky thing because everybody believes is busy, so why are you risking breaking a lot of things if you can move forward and "live" with the problems. XP (Extreme Programming) got this right from the get-go, you need the principles and values. XP has a value called: courage; courage to do refactoring, especially when the conditions are not in your favor, considering monoliths and distributed monoliths the odds are never in your favor. Once you start doing so, slowly put all guardrails in place, would such c...

XP (Extreme Programming) leaders popularized CI (Continous Integration) in the late 90s. The idea was very simple, to continuously integrate code in a common branch usually called trunk, nowadays we call it main. The principles behind CI were (A) Reduce feedback cycles (B) Increase response time and release software faster. CI it's a powerful concept, that requires automation of the build process and of course, automated tests. In order to do CI you also an SCM (Source Code Management system), in the past there were various solutions like CVS (not a drugstore), SVN, and GIT rules today. By definition CI also requires continuous merging, which leads to interesting realizations like, how often should we merge, the answer is as much as possible, as frequent as possible. Today's environments are more complicated than they were in the 90s, back in that time, the CI process was generating one single binary. 

Last month I was blogging about how code review is dead . Today I want to share some principles and practices to make things better. In the previous post I shared some actions, now let's understand the principles behind many of these actions.  First of all, can we save code reviews, and make them better, for sure we can. It's not that hard, for the code review it self-improve we need a couple of things in place. Usually, engineers have the same complaints like It takes a long time to do code reviews, there are too many files, I don't know this code or this service, etc... The fact is there are multiple mindset problems here. 

How we work matters, a lot. Unfortunately, very often engineers and managers don't care about engineering working practices, which is a big mistake. How we work is the key to heaven or the highway to hell. Code review is a pretty default practice, it's everywhere, companies do code review, at least that is what they claim. But how good is the code review? How many times do you need to be chasing engineers to beg them to merge your code? How many times are you actually getting useful feedback or bugs are being caught? Very often engineers don't prioritize code review, which means that quality is not being prioritized. Quality, to some degree, needs to be prioritized and to some degree enforced. There are many forces that make code reviews skipped and not performed with the due diligence that they need such as unrealistic release pressure, lack of critical talent density, poor engineering culture, low standards, and many other factors. Some languages have stronger type system...

I was always a big believer in metadata and observability. Tagging is another form of observability, the idea is very basic and yet not well explored in our industry. You add metadata to a resource. Metadata is just data that describes data. Why bother? Well, at scale, there will be hundreds to thousands of resources including ec2 machines, container images, security groups, load balancers, and all kinds of applications like services, bffs, aggregators, a much more. How do you make sense of these resources? How do you know if you need them after all? Cloud computing is great but also is a big cost center. Understanding your resources is critical, not only for savings but for better infrastructure management. Tags help with cost, but they go beyond cost.  Endless Resources So let's say you have some scale, easily you can have hundreds to thousands of ec2 and dozens to hundreds of lamdas. The first question that should come to mind is ownership, how own all these resources? By not ha...

Once upon a time, Design Patterns was a big thing. In current times, perceptions have shifted and the industry has mixed feelings about them. I've thought a lot of blogging about design patterns was worth it or not. I used a lot of patterns in my life, there were moments when I was completely okay with design patterns, and other times not so okay. I got some mixed feelings but today I think they are fine. IMHO there are some fairness and some misconceptions. There are hundreds of Design Patterns, there are patterns for everything you can imagine. Usually when people complain about patterns they are talking about OOP patterns, more specifically from the 90s book from the GOF .   Patterns are not limited to OO, there are functional programming patterns, system programming patterns, OS patterns, cloud computing patterns, frontend patterns, and mobile patterns. Lots of these patterns are very similar, at the end of the day not all problems are that different, and are all about ideas an...