April Update

Hi all,

In my continuing quest to make sure this monthly newsletter actually gets released monthly, you'll notice that I am just squeaking under the wire to get this edition out before the end of the month. Well, actually, for those of you who are further ahead, timezone-wise, it might already be May for you (hello to my readers in Australia and New Zealand!), but I'm still counting this as a win.

In this month's edition, I manage to get back to writing, I go to a conference and actually get to watch some talks, and some blatant promotion for someone else's book. Onwards!

Writing!

After a prolonged delay due to a house move and some associated construction work, I'm back working on the Building Resilient Distributed Systems book. In a moment of stunning (and completely forseeable irony), my chapter on Scaling for said book got too big, and has been split out.

One of the first things to emerge from that mess is a chapter focused on message brokers. A bit about how they work, but mostly about how they can be useful to make inter-process communication more reliable (or not). So expect a discussion about delivery guarantees, message replay, inboxes and outboxes, and probably a bit more. My goal is to have this available in early access in the next few weeks once it's had a review from my editor and tech reviewers.

Cloud Application Architecture Patterns

I didn't only find time for writing for my own book, I was also lucky enough to be asked to write the foreword to the book Cloud Application Architecture Patterns by Kyle Brown, Bobby Woolf, Joseph Yoder.

As I put it in my foreword: "This book is all about getting applications to work with the cloud, rather than in spite of the cloud.". This is a book for those of you who are looking at how to architect applications well to take advantage of the cloud. It's no surprise with the track record of the authors that the book is packed with useful patterns. You can read it now if you have an O'Reilly subscription, otherwise go and pre-order it from your local bookshop (or the big online one if you have to!).

Things Of Interest - QCon London Edition

My normal things of interest section is this month replaced with cool talks I saw at QCon London. Just to explain, normally when I attend conferences it's because I am speaking, and I'm also trying to combine this with general client work, catching up with speakers, speaking to attendees and lots of things that aren't actually attending talks. This means that over the last few years despite attending lots of events I haven't actually seen many talks in person, which is downright silly.

So this time around for QCon London, I attended lots of talks (as well as delivering my own), and took lots of notes, and had an ace time. All of the talks mentioned below will be made available for free over at InfoQ at some point (although attendees can already watch them), so keep your eyes peeled for these. My own personal highlights (in no particular order):

• Matthew Clark and Ian Arundale shared how the BBC makes use of the cloud to deliver cost effective, scalable systems. This is all the more challenging when considering the scrutiny the BBC gets as a public service broadcaster.
• My favourite talk of the conference was by Asgaut Mjølne Söderbom and Ola Hast from Sparebank1 Utvikling. They shared their experiences of adopting pair programming. This was a very clear (and open) discussion about how they adopted pair programming and the benefits it gave. It's partly because of my own experiences (and biases) that I enjoyed this talk so much. It reminded me so strongly of when I first saw pair programing, trunk-based development and proper continuous integration together, and everything just clicked for me. In a conference where (understandably) GenAI dominated, it was great to see a talk about more "basic" development practices that are so relevant and yet also so misunderstood being presented so well. Bravo, Asgaut and Ola.
• Martha Lambert from Incident.io shared how a layered approach to dashboards can help improve observability. I enjoyed the fact that it focused very much on the role of the (human) observer and what they need at a given moment in time. Some very concrete, practical advice in this one.
• Luca Mezzalira did a lovely talk wrapping up his experiences to date to help share what he thinks the ideal micro-frontend platform looks like. Luca is very much the expert on this particular topic, and you can read the early version of the 2nd edition of his book now.
• Birgitta Böckeler, from ThoughtWorks, did an excellent state of the union presentation on where the industry is with regards to AI-assisted software delivery. Given that Birgitta leads this area for ThoughtWorks, she had a lot of great insights to share - it's also the first time the hype around Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers made sense (and then scared me a bit when I started looking into the security side of things).
• In a blatant plug, I delivered my talk around timeouts, retries and idempotency on Daniel Bryant's track. Olimpiu Pop did a lovely writeup of my talk for InfoQ, and I'm hoping to record a podcast with Olimpiu soon so we can explore this in more detail.

Upcoming Events

A bit light this month, as I have some events confirmed but yet not publicly announced, but next month I hope to confirm events in Berlin, Copenhagen, Utrect and Amsterdam for September and beyond.

• Craft Conf 2025 - Budapest, Hungary. I'll be heading back to Craft on the 29th and 30th of May. A consistently great lineup in one of the more unique conference venues.
• Architecture Conference 2025 - Tokyo, Japan. It's been a dream of mine to visit Japan for years, and I'm very grateful to be invited to deliver two keynotes at this event on November 20th & 21st. If you're in Japan and are interested in having me do something for your company while I am there, then do let me know! I might as well keep busy if I'm going to fly all that way...

Ask Me Anything

Finally, as with last month, I wanted to collect some questions you might have around microservices, cloud, continuous delivery or resiliency. So please send me your questions!