Martin C. Richards

Make Your Codebase Inevitable In the previous post, I narrowed the harness down to the parts that matter most: Skills and Loop.

What’s Inside the Harness In March I published Building Your Own Agent Harness.

Test behaviour, not implementation Most testing arguments get lost in theoretical minutiae and miss the point: validating correctness.

Are we microservice yet?

Building Your Own Agent Harness I’ve been trying to write about coding agents for a while.

Scaling a Double-Entry Ledger for a Massive PSP In Part 1, we built a real-time double-entry ledger using optimistic locking.

Optimistic Locking in a Double-Entry Ledger Ledgers are a deceptively simple problem to tackle.

Relational DynamoDB: When DynamoDB Stops Being Simple Let’s be clear about something upfront: if you’re using DynamoDB as a simple key-value store—storing session data, caching API responses, or managing user preferences—you don’t need any of this.

Relational DynamoDB: Building GitHub’s Backend in DynamoDB In Part 1, we covered why DynamoDB forces you to think differently—you design for access patterns, not flexibility.

Relational DynamoDB: Advanced Patterns and Production Realities In Part 1, we covered the fundamental tradeoffs.

Events vs Commands: The Distinction Everyone Always Forgets Here’s the thing about event-driven architecture, everyone keeps shooting themselves in the foot by mixing up events and commands.

EDA for the Rest of Us: Operational Challenges This is the final post in the “EDA for the Rest of Us” series.

EDA for the Rest of Us: Consumption Patterns This is part 4 of the “EDA for the Rest of Us” series.

EDA for the Rest of Us: Communication Patterns This is part 3 of the “EDA for the Rest of Us” series.

EDA for the Rest of Us: Event Design Patterns This is part 2 of the “EDA for the Rest of Us” series.

EDA for the Rest of Us: A Guide for the Confused Over the past couple of months I’ve been trying to figure out what it means to have an event-driven architecture (EDA)?

Just use Make as your Task Runner Make is ubiquitous on *nix systems, and it’s a great way to automate tasks.

An Idiots Guide to mocking HTTP with MSW I recently had some real trouble getting MSW to work with my tests.

Deploying NodeJS with pnpm and tsx In the previous post we packaged our NodeJS application as a single “binary” by bundling everything into single file that can deployed without the need to for the node_modules.

Building NodeJS Apps with ESBuild and Docker NodeJS is famous for it’s the ridiculous size of the node_modules, which can easily baloon into a gigabyte of files on disk.

Python, Poetry and Docker.

The 3 pillars of observability in Quarkus Quarkus Quarkus is part of a new crop of lightweight, fast, container first Java frameworks.

Adding OpenAPI Specs to Finatra OpenAPI (A.K.A.

Unit Testing: Ain’t nobody got time for that!

How to find what you are looking for?

Apache Camel Part II: TDDing CSV Parsing Apache Camel Series: This post forms part of a series of blog posts about writing a “Real World Application” with Apache Camel.

Efficient XML Parsing with Java.

Apache Camel Part I: Guicing Camel Apache Camel Series: This post forms part of a series of blog posts about writing a “Real World Application” with Apache Camel.

EIP and Apache Camel Apache Camel is an incredible piece of software that allows you to easly define complex EIP workflows with absolute ease.

Wordpress Done Right Wordpress is 22% of the internet, that is insane.

WebAudio fun with a theremin This is simply a more complete / working demo of the one Mozilla have made, it acts as simple demostration of the WebAudio API.

Build your own Heroku with Dokku Heroku is great!

Deploying a static site to S3 Static stite generators are a great, simple way to manage simple websites for the technically savy.

Troll people with OmniSharp Emacs As great an IDE Visual Studio is; I’ve never been able to be as comfortable in it as I am when coding in emacs.

twitter: @martinffx email: martinffx@gmail.com

You can follow my experimentations and contributions on github.

This is my personal blog, where I hope to write about things I learn on the way to being a better developer.