Architecture

What to Look for at RubyConf 2018: Jeremy Hanna and Molly Struve Previewed Their Talks at 8th Light

• Nicole Carpenter
• 13 Nov 2018
• Community
• Architecture

RubyConf 2018 kicks off today in downtown Los Angeles. Since 2001, RubyConf has gathered the global Ruby community to discuss emerging trends and share insights....more.

Microservices Aren’t Magic: Handling Timeouts

• Colin Jones
• 18 Sep 2018
• Architecture
• Microservices
• Error Handling

Microservices are a big deal. They can give us some pretty big wins for our architectures and teams, but microservices have plenty of costs too....more.

The Hypermedia Maturity Model

• Jason Desrosiers
• 30 May 2018
• Hypermedia
• Architecture

This is part three in a series about hypermedia and REST. You don't need to read the previous post to follow this one, but if...more.

Decoupling the Client and Server with Hypermedia

• Jason Desrosiers
• 11 Apr 2018
• Hypermedia
• Architecture

This is part two in a series about hypermedia and REST. You don't need to read the previous post to follow this one, but if...more.

Duration vs. Concurrency in AWS Lambda

• Colin Jones
• 09 Apr 2018
• AWS
• Architecture

[Updated 2018-04-16] I was corrected on Twitter about how Event (async) invocation throttling behaves, and have updated this post accordingly in several places marked like...more.

Basic Web App Architecture 101

• Sarah Sunday
• 04 Apr 2018
• Architecture
• Web App

Okay, so you want to build a web app. Let's use a very basic web application for instance. The user story is this: The user...more.

Turning Up The Good On REST APIs

• Jason Desrosiers
• 21 Mar 2018
• Hypermedia
• Architecture
• Tools

This is part one in a series about hypermedia and REST. If you like this and want to read more, check out the full series....more.

Two Design Patterns You're Probably Already Using

• Becca Nelson
• 22 May 2017
• Architecture
• Craftsmanship
• Coding
• Design Patterns

I came into this field from a very non-technical background. And when I say very non-technical, I mean that I was an elementary fine arts...more.

What Is Assumed When Deferring Database Decisions?

• Patrick Gombert
• 18 Apr 2016
• Architecture

I first heard about the idea of deferring database decisions from Bob Martin, who pioneered the concept while working on FitNesse and has expanded on...more.

Concurrency Control Strategies for Secret Agents

• Kevin Buchanan
• 17 Aug 2015
• Coding
• Architecture
• Clojure

In the 1963 movie "Dr. No," the first in the James Bond series, Bond travels to Jamaica for a case, and he knows that his...more.

Decomposing Asynchronous Workers in Ruby

• Kevin Buchanan
• 04 May 2015
• Coding
• Architecture
• Ruby

I'm a proponent of building small, composable pieces over one large piece that does many things. The large piece usually works well, but it eliminates...more.

Loose Coupling in Go lang

• Javier Saldana
• 06 Feb 2015
• Craftsmanship
• Architecture

Go lang offers a wide range of features that help us achieve loosely coupled program designs. Coupling refers to the direct knowledge that an element...more.

Organizing Your Clojure Environment and Logs with Leiningen

• Kevin Buchanan
• 08 Dec 2014
• Coding
• Architecture
• Clojure

Coming from a Rails environment, one of the things I took for granted was a nice logging setup in which all logs were written to...more.

Mistaking Encapsulation for Abstraction

• Kevin Buchanan
• 04 Nov 2014
• Coding
• Architecture
• Craftsmanship

"Abstract" is a commonly used word in software. I hear it a few times every day. "Can we make an abstraction around this?" "Let's move...more.

Take Pride in Your Legacy (Code)

• Ginny Hendry
• 11 Jul 2014
• Architecture

A developer joining a project, unless the project is starting a completely new application, will be working with dreaded “legacy code.” The process of becoming...more.

Pattern Language of Thieves

• Craig Demyanovich
• 09 Jul 2014
• Architecture

What do architects (designers of buildings), software developers, and thieves have in common? They each have a pattern language. I was watching “Ocean’s Twelve” recently...more.

Leaky Libraries: How To Assess The Risk Of Dependencies

• Ben Voss
• 26 May 2014
• Tools
• Architecture

A library is a package of code. Usually a library is small. It is focused on solving a single problem. A library is created when...more.

Modular JavaScript

• Cymen Vig
• 27 Sep 2013
• Coding
• Architecture

JavaScript is a complicated language. One of the difficult areas is scope. We can think of scope as the world a particular line of code...more.

Conditionals Aren’t Evil, Unless You Duplicate Them

• Wai Lee Chin Feman
• 11 Aug 2013
• Coding
• Architecture

We Hate If Statements Many of us have been taught that, in OOP, most of a program’s “if” statements can be replaced by polymorphism. We...more.

Strive for Simplicity

• Ben Voss
• 08 Jul 2013
• Architecture
• Coding
• Testing

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to pair with Uncle Bob. We were going to pair on a message queue convenience wrapper I...more.

The Repository Pattern

• Mike Ebert
• 23 Mar 2013
• Coding
• Architecture

A recurring theme on the 8th Light blog is decoupling your applications from the implementation of details. A detail can be anything from UI elements...more.

Servers in Source Control

• Micah Martin
• 30 Oct 2012
• Architecture

8th Light has accumulated a lot of servers, the cloud kind, over the years. Each one configured by the team that was building our internally...more.

Implementing and Testing the Singleton Pattern in Ruby

• Josh Cheek
• 20 Oct 2012
• Coding
• Architecture
• Ruby

What is a Singleton Object? The GoF identifies a singleton as a way to "ensure a class only has one instance, and provide a global...more.

Owning Your Dependencies

• Patrick Gombert
• 24 Sep 2012
• Architecture
• Coding

Dependencies are nearly unavoidable for non-trivial software projects. These can be large dependencies, such as web frameworks and databases, or smaller decisions, such as pagination...more.

Explicit Collections

• Cory Foy
• 12 Sep 2012
• Architecture
• Coding
• Ruby

Don't extract that method yet! In programming, we tend to work with collections of objects quite often. For example, we may need to check to...more.

Thinking Differently About the Single Responsibility Principle

• Cory Foy
• 07 Aug 2012
• Architecture
• Craftsmanship

When the Single Responsibility Principle is taught among developers, one aspect - the responsibility - is harped on the most. But what counts as a...more.