1
Monolith First (2015)
Going directly to a microservices architecture is risky, so consider building a monolithic system first. Split to microservices when, and if, you need it.
Martin Fowler
A website on building software effectively
- Popular posts
- 84
- Total points
- 17,805
- HN comments
- 10,168
- Rank
- #33 personal
Visit martinfowler.com → On Hacker News Jun 2009 – Oct 2026
Software Engineering 66Career & Management 20Tech Industry & Business 15AI & Machine Learning 13Society, Policy & Culture 10Systems & Performance 8
2
Software Architecture Guide
Software Architecture is the important aspects of a software system's internal design, usually its major components and aspects that are hard to change.
3
Technical Debt
Technical Debt is a metaphor for the consequences of cruft. You either have to accept a drag on further features (paying interest) or fix the software (paying the principal)
4
An example of LLM prompting for programming
Generated knowledge and chain of thought prompting of an LLM can generate useful code.
5
Serverless Architectures
Serverless architectures replace a managed server with a collection of third party services and FaaS
6
Is TDD Dead? (2014)
A series of conversations between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler. We discuss Test-Driven Development (TDD) and its impact upon software design.
7
Maximizing Developer Effectiveness
To be successful at digital transformation you need to optimize the key feedback loops in your software engineering organization
8
Some thoughts on LLMs and software development
a short post
9
Mythical Man Month
a bliki entry for Mythical Man Month
10
Technical, cognitive, and intent debt
three layers of system health, AI as cognitive system 3, what's expensive if agents make coding free, and the future of source code
11
The role of developer skills in agentic coding
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
12
Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?
We usually perceive that it costs more to get higher quality, but software internal quality actually reduces costs.
13
Patterns of Distributed Systems (2020)
A catalog of patterns to better understand, communicate, and teach the design of distributed systems
14
Micro Frontends
How to split up your large, complex, frontend codebases into simple, composable, independently deliverable apps.
15
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
Notes from my colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
16
What do you mean by “Event-Driven”?
Some notes on the different patterns that may be present when people talk about event-driven architectures.
17
You Can't Buy Integration
The usual build-versus-buy rules for applications don't apply to integration
18
Yagni
Yagni ("You Aren't Gonna Need It") is the principle that we should not build presumptive features. It should not be used as a justification for neglecting internal quality.
19
Paxos
Use two consensus building phases to reach safe consensus even when nodes disconnect
20
The Second Edition of “Refactoring”
I'm finishing a new edition of my Refactoring book. Here's details and periodic memos about my work.
21
Now that people are considering NOSQL will more people consider no-DB
A memory image replaces database interactions with in-memory data using event sourcing to record persistent changes
22
Announcing the Second Edition of “Refactoring”
I'm finishing a new edition of my Refactoring book. Here's details and periodic memos about my work.
23
The State of Agile Software in 2018
Agile Software Development may be mainstream, but much of what's done is faux-agile, and we need to push back.
24
Strangler pattern, a powerful simple concept to do refactoring
Inspired by the strangler figs in Australia, a strangler fig application gradually draws behavior out of its host legacy application
25
The LMAX Architecture - 100K TPS at Less than 1ms Latency
LMAX is a retail financial trading system that can handle that can 6 million orders per second on a single JVM thread. The business logic runs in-memory surrounded by disruptors using event sourcing.
26
Microservice Trade-Offs
The microservices architecture can be useful, but to know if it's suitable in your context you need to understand its costs and benefits.
27
The Future of AI Software Development
Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases
28
Building your own CLI coding agent with Pydantic-AI
How to build a CLI coding agent
29
Building reliable agentic AI systems
AI helping pharmaceutical researchers query decades of information buried in PDF reports
30
The one true REST explanation
Leonard Richardson's model for understanding a RESTful architecture as steps in a maturity model. Levels are (1) resources, (2) HTTP verbs and return codes, and (3) hypertext controls.