Architecture and Design

This hub collects our writing on software architecture for people who have to defend their decisions in a design review, not just admire them in a diagram. That includes how to structure services, when a monolith is still the right call, and what breaks when a system outgrows its original design. We look at how established companies actually built for scale, including the streaming platform’s engineering choices and the stack decisions behind Slack’s growth, because the tradeoffs they made are more instructive than any abstract pattern.

A good amount of architecture work is really about avoiding known failure modes. We cover common anti patterns that slow teams down, along with microservices design patterns, distributed systems, resilience, gRPC, and the backend decisions that determine whether a system can be maintained by people who didn’t build it. The goal is to give engineering leaders enough context to make a call and enough detail to explain it to their team.

If you’re weighing whether to rebuild, extend, or replace part of a system, some of these decisions are worth making with outside engineers who have done it before. Our teams work alongside yours on custom software development when an architecture needs to be rethought rather than patched, and we take on bespoke software development for organisations that need a system designed around their actual constraints rather than a generic template. For process and delivery questions that sit next to architecture, see how we approach Agile and Project Management and our broader Development Process writing.