Newest first, grouped by year. Search or filter by topic.
The series retrospective - what the AI-era evidence actually says with every figure dated and attributed, the nine characteristics of ISO 25010 as revised in 2023, and what I now gate differently when much of the diff was machine-written.
Eleven numbers that still haunt engineering dashboards - what killed each one, from Goodhart to queueing theory to changing fashion, and the one-line replacement carved on every headstone.
Measuring the lines between the boxes - afferent and efferent coupling, the instability ratio, Robert C. Martin's main sequence, and the cohesion metric that catches a class doing two jobs, plus where every one of them needs a human to overrule it.
The composite score that hides more than it shows and the percentage that translates code quality into money - where the maintainability index formula came from, why its logarithms flatten real problems, and how the technical debt ratio earns its place as a trend.
Two complexity metrics that look interchangeable and answer different questions - McCabe's 1976 path count is a testing instrument, SonarSource's cognitive score is a readability instrument, and only one of them earns a place in the merge gate.
Dashboards go green while codebases rot - the opener of a fourteen-part series on measuring code quality and software delivery without staging the theatre that ruins both.
Engineering Craft carries 25 of the framework's 100 points and splits into nine sub-disciplines - why writing code earns only 18 of them, why architecture is the most leveraged skill in the model, and why reading code overtakes writing it by the time seniority arrives.
The retrospective, with the ledger totalled - seven byte-identical MessageBrokers, one AggregateRoot with three meanings, what Convey genuinely optimises, where a Convey.Bootstrap meta-layer should have stood, and what a consumer should copy from this estate.
Redis registered in nine services and read in one, discovery stacks in services that never call anyone, an outbox package referenced but never wired, and versions that float by construction - an inventory of everything Pacco wires up and never uses.
A refactoring.guru walk through Pacco's real lines - a flags-enum search that can never match, twin guards, a dead password check, mappers that return null, and an Id that is never assigned - each smell named and each paired with the technique that cures it.
The self-styled uber AI order maker resolves to FirstOrDefault behind an in-source confession, and its reservation heuristic structurally out-bids every earlier booking - the estate's data-science audit, written up as the short honest piece its eleven lines deserve.
OrderMaker drives a whole order through a Chronicle saga and reports its progress in a single RabbitMQ header - stamped on every publish, forwarded by seven copied MessageBrokers, read back by Operations, and backed by a saga store that forgets everything on restart.
Deliveries maps domain events into integration events that carry facts while Vehicles publishes bare ids straight from its handlers - two event philosophies in one estate, and a vehicle-to-resource mirror that syncs deletes but never creates.
Operations subscribes to eighty estate messages from one hand-maintained JSON file - a shadow copy of every contract in the system that nothing validates, with ghost entries nobody publishes and real rejections it never lists.
Nine Pacco repositories run dotnet test against zero test projects and stay vacuously green, while the one repo with a real unit-integration-e2e-performance pyramid is the only one whose Travis config omits the test step.
MessageBroker.cs exists in seven Pacco repositories and hashes identically once you substitute the service name - this part inventories the copied glue, finds the double registrations hiding in seventeen-call chains, and weighs copy-paste against a shared kernel.
Convey sells a microservice in thirty lines, and Pacco builds ten of them - this series reads the whole estate to price what the framework compresses and what every consumer pays for by hand. Part 1 of The Convey Consumer Tax.
Each concern in DShop.Common builds a throwaway DI container just to read config - nine per service, atop three coexisting container frameworks and a vendored config parser.
DShop.Web is a well-structured Angular 6 SPA whose plumbing leaks at every joint - an auth header discarded, PUT and DELETE that both GET, a paged result that starts empty. A tour of bugs that only survive because nobody ran the code.
A reusable try-catch-finally wrapper in DShop.Common awaits a null-conditional delegate - so the success path throws a NullReferenceException the failure path avoids.
The DShop monolith was abandoned with a NotImplementedException sitting directly in the order path. Reading its honest ledger is a masterclass in what an unfinished codebase confesses about itself.
DShop.Common's correlation context threads request identity through every message hop - and a long positional argument list quietly transposes half its fields.
Nine DShop services share one skeleton stamped out by hand - and the places they quietly disagree teach more than the places they match. A drift catalogue read from the real source. Part 2 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.
The honest retrospective - copy-paste as a pattern, zero tests, PII in telemetry and what employee-monitoring data demands, destructive error handling, and the handful of decisions that genuinely earned their keep.
