Although the title may sound provocative, software indeed doesn’t need “maintenance” in the traditional sense. Unlike a house or a car, it doesn’t require oil changes, repainting, or rust protection. If the hardware is still functioning, software will operate the same way it did on the day it was created, even a hundred years later. So, why do we treat software systems as if they were physical infrastructure, and then act surprised when that approach fails?
You said the feature will take one day of development, but it has been three months and it is still not finished!
Our marketing created the campaign page themselves, because it takes IT forever to setup anything!
Sounds familiar? I have been on both ends of these conversations, but mostly on the “being yelled at” end. For a long time, I was puzzled. Why was this happening?
Some time ago, I wrote about The Treachery of Images, which is one of my beloved paintings and also served me as a byway to my rant. Today, let’s take a look at The Domain of Arnheim, also by my favorite Belgian René Magritte. We’ll also explore where the name comes from and what does it have to do with Edgar Allan Poe. No rant today.
So you are building a software product. Maybe it’s provided as software-as-a-service, maybe it’s run by your customers. Doesn’t matter. There always comes a time, when one of your customers comes to you with a request for a special feature. Let’s explore what are your options for how to deal with this and what to watch out for.
Development organizations embrace micro-services as a scaling architecture pattern. They also have to provide access to their systems thru various interfaces - desktop, mobile web, mobile applications and various third parties thru APIs. Designing a convenient access architecture is challenging, especially when you also have some legacy systems and services to talk to. Let’s take a look at one design pattern, which can help.
I always thought “digital transformation” was just another buzzword like “big data” or “industry 4.0”. As part of my consulting work I however meet successful companies, usually profitable ones, which perform their business same as they used to for the past years, using only minimum digital tools. And suddenly, that just is not enough. Sometimes they are production companies, but more often they are wholesale or retail. They need to digitally transform. So it looks it’s not a buzzword after all.
I am running my own e-mail server. This also means, I have to fight spam by myself. I am using Spamassassin, like everybody else and it works fine most of the time. Recently, however, I have been getting quite a bit of spam that looks really sophisticated - it has SPF headers, proper formatting etc. One thing it has in common is, it’s sent from the newly added top level domains, like .icu, .club, .xyz and the like. And we can use that.
The 2019 Cloudflare outage highlighted the importance of treating configuration as code. This article explores why configuration should be managed with the same rigor as software code, discusses common pitfalls in deployment practices, and emphasizes the need for thorough testing to ensure system stability and performance.
Determining the order of events in a distributed system isn’t straightforward, as the concept of “now” is relative. This article explores the challenges of achieving consensus in distributed systems and why relying on proven algorithms like Raft or Paxos may be essential.
