Articles
Worth reading
A short take on pieces worth your time — architecture, AI, system design, and engineering careers — each one linked back to its original source.
3 articles
Strangler Fig
The pattern for replacing a legacy system without ever staging the terrifying "big bang" cutover: put a facade in front of the old system, and move functionality behind it into the new system piece by piece until there's nothing left to strangle. I've seen a version of this used on more than one banking migration, and the value isn't the metaphor — it's the discipline it forces, routing real traffic through the seam from day one instead of building the replacement in isolation and hoping the switchover goes smoothly. Short, practical, and still the reference point everyone eventually points to.
Introducing Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture
Uber's insight here is one I wish more teams internalized before splitting a monolith: a microservice architecture is still just one large distributed program, and it benefits from the same domain boundaries and layering discipline you'd apply to any big codebase — they just happen to be enforced by network calls instead of package boundaries. DOMA's structure (domains, gateways, layers) is a genuinely useful vocabulary for reasoning about service sprawl instead of just letting it happen organically. Good read once your service count has outgrown your ability to reason about it.
Microservices
The essay that put a name and a definition to an architectural style most of us were already half-doing by instinct — nine characteristics, from componentization via services to decentralized data management, laid out with none of the conference-talk hype the term later picked up. What holds up more than a decade later is the honesty about the cost side: microservices trade simplicity for operational complexity, and Fowler and Lewis say so plainly rather than selling it as a free upgrade. If you only ever read one primary source before an architecture debate about services vs. monolith, make it this one.