michaelnygard.com

Back in April, I had the good fortune to speak at Craft Conf in lovely Budapest.

When I was at Totality, we treated an outage in our customers' content management system as a Sev 2 issue.

Once you begin to fear your technology, you will shortly have cause to fear it even more.

There's a well-known architectural style in desktop applications called "Components and Glue".

I have a rich and multidimensional relationship with Amazon.

My last post on the subject of inverted ownership felt a bit abstract, so I thought I might illustrate it with a typical scenario.

One of the sources of semantic coupling has to do with identifiers, and especially with synthetic identifiers.

On the subject of maneuverability, many organizations run into trouble when they try to enter new lines of business, create a partnership, or merge with another company.

Agile development works best at team scale.

If I had to guess, I would say that "Layers" is probably the most commonly applied architecture pattern.

One company that gets this right is Github.

Inspired by Glenn Vanderburg's article on Clojure templating frameworks, I decided to try using Fleet for my latest pet project.

I used to think that metaphor was just a literary technique, that it was something you could use to dress up some piece of creative writing.

Metaphoric problems in rest systems by mtnygard

Let’s engage in a thought experiment for a moment.

FaKod (I think that translates as "The Fatalistic Coder"?)

I’ve been asked to sit on a panel regarding the future of software development.

People who don't live in operations can carry some funny misconceptions in their heads.

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.

I’m working on a syllabus for an extensive course on web architecture.

There’s an old joke about a couple of folks on a plane who hear the captain successively announce that they’ve lost one, two, then three engines.

The mighty Mississippi River starts in Minnesota, at Lake Itasca.

Google has published an explanation of the widespread GMail outage from September 1st.

I’ve been doing some work with Hadoop lately, and I just ran into an interesting problem with networking.

Spiros Tzavellas pointed me to his implementation of Circuit Breaker.

The excellent Will Sargent has created a Circuit Breaker gem that's quite nice.

We’ve all heard the old saw, “It’s a poor workman that blames his tools.”

As you can probably tell from my recent posts, I’ve been learning Scala.

Failure to understand or represent units has caused several major disasters, including the costly Ariane 5 disaster in 1996.

It’s been a while since I blogged anything, mainly because most of my work lately has either been mind-numbing corporate stuff, or so highly contextualized that it wouldn’t be productive to write about.

The Australian JAOO conferences are now just one month away.

Backups are the only macroscopic system we commonly deal with that exhibits quantum mechanical effects.

It looks like the early reports that Sun’s cloud API would be compatible with AWS resulted from the reporters’ exuberance (or mere confusion.)

I’m convinced that the next great productivity revolution will be de-matrixing the organizations we’ve just spent ten years slicing and dicing.

Update: Please read this update.

In my last post, I user some back-of-the-envelope reliability calculations, with just one interesting bit, to estimate the availability of a single-stacked web application, shown again here.

Suppose you build a web site out of a single stack of one web, app, and database server.

I had need of a stencil that would let me drop monthly calendars on a number of pages.

I love the way that proggit bubbles stuff around.

What is it about enterprise applications that makes them suck?

Pick something in your world and start measuring it.

I made a LibraryThing list of books relevant to the stuff that’s banging around in my head now.

Last night, I did something pretty drastic.

Alex Miller has a really interesting blog post up today.

Like a geocache, this is another post meant to help somebody who stumbles across it in a future Google search.

O'Reilly has released "Beautiful Architecture," a compilation of essays by software and system architects.

There are about a jillion forum posts and official pages on the web that talk about ORA-12541, the infamous "TNS:No Listener" error.

This is off the beaten path today, maybe even off the whole reservation.

This evening, I'm speaking at OTUG.

"Good marketing can kill your site at any time."