Decentralized data management requires automation to scale governance effectively. Fitness functions are a powerful automated governance technique my colleagues have applied to data products within the context of a Data Mesh. Since data products serve as the foundational building blocks of a data strategy, ensuring robust governance around them significantly increases the chances of success. Kiran Prakash explains how to do this, starting with simple tests for key architectural characteristics and moving on to leveraging metadata and Large Language Models. more ..read more

Two decades ago, I posted that I found that the strangler fig plant was an interesting metaphor for the gradual replacement of a legacy system. I didn’t refer to the metaphor since, but meanwhile it grew a life of its own. Other people increasingly referred to the strangler fig approach to modernization, and traffic to that post steadily increased: currently it gets about 5000 page views a month, one of the more popular pages on this site. So I decided I needed to update that page, and have rewritten it, focusing on the core activities we need to do to make a success of such a venture. (This s ..read more

From time to time I take a look at my site analytics to see how much traffic various bits of this site get. When doing this I saw that I continue to get a lot of traffic to the Catalog of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. I put this together not long after writing the book, and it’s rather minimal. Since it still gets traffic I felt it was time for some sprucing up. The content is the same, summaries of the patterns in the book. I’ve changed the main catalog page to include the pattern intents. I’ve also added deep links to the book on oreilly.com, so if you have a subscription ..read more

The steady increase in deployment of AI tools has led a lot of people concerned about how software makes decisions that affect our lives. In one example, its about “algorithmic” feeds in social media that promote posts that drive engagement. A more serious impact can come from business decisions, such as how much premium to charge in car insurance. This can extend to affecting legal decisions, such as suggesting sentencing guidelines to judges. Faced with these concerns, there is often a movement to restrict the use of algorithms, such as a recent activity in New York to restrict how social me ..read more

Matteo Vaccari completes his article on testing template-generated HTML, by looking at how to use TDD with pages that make calls to the server. more ..read more

Testing templates for generating HTML leads to tests that are very similar. Matteo Vaccari wisely likes to separate the common elements of tests from those that vary. He continues his article to show how he does this by parameterizing the tests. The resulting tests are easier to write, and more importantly, faster to understand and modify. more ..read more

Juntao Qiu's completes his set of data fetching patterns for single-page applications. Prefetching involves fetching data before it's called for in the application flow. Although this can mean data is fetched unnecessarily, it reduces latency should the data be needed. more ..read more

Single-Page Applications often require a lot of code to be downloaded to the browser, which can delay a page's initial appearance. Juntao Qiu's next pattern, Code Splitting, describes how this code can be divided up, so that modules are only loaded if they are going to be needed, and the dangers of doing so. more ..read more

Last week I added a small feature to this website, changing the way it renders footnotes. That prompted me to write this quick note about how I use footnotes, and how that influences the best way to render them. more ..read more

Juntao Qiu's next data fetching pattern looks at how to specify fallback behavior using markup. This allows developers to pull such declarations out of the JavaScript components and into the markup they use while laying out the rest of the page. Juntao's React example shows how this works with the Suspense element, with a similar approach in vue.js. more ..read more