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Front-end architecture is a very important aspect I consider when developing apps. I've been developing front end since around 2007, and since then, I've been interested in software architecture concepts, design patterns, and code organization.
Once, in a code review session, I was trying to explain a certain strategy I would have liked the code would be, then a colleague told me:
Internationalization in software development, known as “i18n” for its number of letters, is as vital as ever for modern companies. Web-based products and services are no longer tied to geographical and cultural boundaries and not every potential customer speak English. You might have designed your app with your native region in mind, but you’ll eventually need to expand your supported languages and regions to cater to a global audience.
In this article, you’ll learn about the scope of internationalization and the tools that are available to build software with internationalization logic. You’ll also see how our app's own internationalization workflow is designed and our suggestions for how to do it yourself.
The more I learn about edge computing, the more I look for compelling use cases that developers can relate to. Today, I have one: edge redirects.
Imagine you manage a website with a lot of content. I’m talking, like hundreds of thousands of articles. One day, you decide it’s time to change the domain name.
PostgreSQL announced its latest version (PostgreSQL 14) on September 30th, which includes a bunch of features like pipeline API, gathering statistics on replication slots, query parallelism improvements and so on.
While the origin of PostgreSQL can be traced back to 1986, it has been in active development for the past 30 years. Tons of companies, agnostic of the the type and size, have trusted Postgres over the years and their tagline “The world's most advanced open source relational database” is hardly an overstatement.
If you’re an engineer who’s been tasked with planning out your application’s communication strategy, this post will help you map out the landscape. You’ll come away understanding the three core types of user communication APIs and in which circumstances you should use them to create the best possible end-user experience.
As modern applications have become increasingly feature-rich and performant, user expectations are at an all-time high. Failure to communicate key information or displaying out-of-date information frustrates users and causes a loss of trust. Think about the last time you ordered something online: if you didn’t receive your order confirmation within seconds, you probably began to worry that something went wrong. Users require product transparency for consistent use.
"The log4j vulnerability is the most serious vulnerability I have seen in my decades-long career", Jen Easterly US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director
Log4j is a Java-based logging utility part of the Apache logging services. This is a popular logging tool used in tens of thousands of software packages. Google estimates that 8% of Maven Central Repository was affected with about 7000 artifacts directly dependent on log4j (either a version of log4j-core or log4j-api). Every major software company went into crisis mode, they were trying to figure out how their products could possibly be affected and if so how they were going to patch the vulnerability. Lattix being a Java-based application also needed to scan its codebase.
This is the fourth and final post in our series on how you, the developer, can build or improve your company’s notification system. It follows the first post about identifying user requirements, the second about designing with scalability and reliability in mind, and the third about setting up routing and preferences. In this piece, we will learn about using observability and analytics to set your system and company up for success.
Developing an application can often feel like you're building in the dark. Even after development, gathering and organizing performance data is invaluable for ongoing maintenance. This is where observability comes in—it’s the ability to monitor your application’s operation and understand what it’s doing. With close monitoring, observability is a superpower that allows developers to use various data points to foresee potential errors or outages and make informed decisions to prevent these from occurring.
We’ve seen many job titles surrounding Software Architecture. Solution Architects, System Architects, Cloud Architects, Application Architects, Information Architects, Enterprise Architects, etc.
Formalized title or not, you should have people in your organization who:
Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) has fast become the de facto framework used for building applications to facilitate audio and video communication over the web. WebRTC connects users through their browsers or on their mobile devices. In this post, we’ll get you up to speed on why WebRTC is so widely adopted for development today. Along the way, we’ll use Infobip’s set of SDKs to get quickly get started.
Let’s begin by diving a bit deeper into the details and history of WebRTC.
This is the third post in our series on how you, a developer, can build or improve the best notification system for your company. It follows the first post about identifying user requirements and designing with scalability and reliability in mind. In this piece, we will learn about setting up routing and preferences.
Notifications serve a range of purposes, from delivering news to providing crucial security alerts that require immediate attention. A reliable notification system both enables valuable interactions between an organization and its customers and prospects and also drives user engagement. These systems combine software engineering with the art of marketing to the right people at the right time.
I have interviewed many engineers and managers lately, and one of the standard questions I ask is how to build high-quality software. Of course, I provide more context and explanations, but the gist is the same. I heard all kinds of answers. However, I was puzzled that almost none were systematic, and people immediately went into a specific pet peeve. As part of this exercise, I felt that I had to crystalize my answer to this question and write it down.
Let me start with high-level thoughts (specifically to make it systematic). First of all, I want to concentrate on software code quality (vs. larger topics, including problem definition, documentation, UX, design, etc.). High-quality software is software that has fewer bugs (and a shorter tail of fixing remaining issues). There are a bunch of other things like code readability, maintainability, debugability, and so on which can easily be swept under the quality umbrella. Let’s concentrate on the core that the product operates as expected.
Standards are awesome.
What kind of world would this be if programming languages allowed () and [] and {} to be used interchangeably or even mixed together? Chaos would ensue.
In my tenure as a solution architect in financial services working for a global consulting firm, I have often questioned the best way to practice enterprise architecture. A common challenge that many architecture consultants face is that most client firms insist on using their proprietary enterprise architecture content. I have observed that frequently such architecture content does not always distinguish between the solution and software architecture.
This article is not an academic paper. In this article, I present my experiences and ideas to help my colleagues better understand the vague differences between two similar but distinct architecture disciplines. At the very least, this article may trigger a conversation via the comments section that may persuade me that I am wrong.
Modern applications are complex, with many different moving parts. Even for the most basic fulfillment center application, front-end interfaces trigger payment processing transactions, which in turn trigger manufacturing and shipping events. These services need a reliable way to communicate with one another regardless of the underlying network or the availability of other services.
To make such complex operations happen, there has to be some type of service “post office” to keep track of all the requests and alerts flying back and forth. The tool that achieves this is the message queue. A message queue is a specialized application that acts as an intermediary between different services of a distributed application or between different applications. It decouples the application services from one another, ensuring that processing occurs whether or not the recipient of a message is available. The message queue ensures all messages are eventually received successfully.
When I Googled “what is GraphQL” to learn more about the network protocols, all I saw was a comparison between REST and GraphQL. Most of the conclusions said, “use GraphQL.” It felt very binary (and trendy, for that matter), which is a problem because each product and use case is unique. The fact is, whatever is newest and shiniest gets recommended more loudly. But you have to weigh the trade-offs and come up with a solution that is best for your situation.
There is a general understanding that either REST is better than GraphQL or vice versa. But the truth is they both address different problems and have different strengths and weaknesses. The question isn’t necessarily which one is better to use, but which one is better to use for specific circumstances. The best way to evaluate GraphQL, REST, or any other technology is to figure out your constraints based on the problem you are going to solve.
Technical leaders and senior developers often ask me about any specific books in software architecture and websites they should read to start working as software architects. I think that the developer is mature enough to develop a technical solution and he or she needs only some additional soft skills.
So, I hope that this list of books will be useful for any technology stack and domain. These books and websites give general information about architecture patterns, technical documentation, techniques to get non-functional requirements and develop soft skills.
The rise of data in motion in the insurance industry is visible across all lines of business, including life, healthcare, travel, vehicle, and others. Apache Kafka changes how enterprises rethink data. This blog post explores use cases and architectures for event streaming. Real-world examples from Generali, Centene, Humana, and Tesla show innovative insurance-related data integration and stream processing in real-time.
Most insurance companies have similar challenges:
This post explores use cases and architectures for processing data in motion with Apache Kafka in Industrial IoT (IIoT) across verticals such as automotive, energy, steel manufacturing, oil&gas, cybersecurity, shipping, logistics. Use cases include predictive maintenance, quality assurance, track and track, real-time locating system (RTLS), asset tracking, customer 360, and more. Examples include BMW, Bosch, Baader, Intel, Porsche, and Devon.
Industrial IoT was a mess of monolithic and proprietary technologies in the last decades. Modbus, Siemens S7, SCADA, and similar "concepts" controlled the industry. Vendors locked in enterprises by intentionally building incompatible products without open interfaces. These systems still run on Windows XP or similar non-supported outdated operating systems and without security in mind.