Articles

Long-form writing on software engineering, systems design, and building things.

From Monolith to Modulith: A Pragmatic Guide to Deconstruction

Everyone wants to break the monolith, but jumping straight to microservices is a fast track to a distributed mess. The Modulith is a more pragmatic step: a single application with strong, enforced internal boundaries. This post explores how to use tools like Packwerk in Rails to achieve modularity without the operational overhead of a distributed system.

The Outbox Pattern: Reliable Event Publishing Without Distributed Transactions

How do you guarantee that an event is sent if, and only if, a database transaction succeeds? The dual-write problem plagues distributed systems, leading to inconsistency and bugs. This post dives deep into the Outbox Pattern, a simple yet powerful solution in Rails to ensure atomic, at-least-once delivery for your critical events.