Topic · 15 posts
Architecture
Systems design for teams that have to operate what they ship. Monolith vs services, where to put the boundary, when to rewrite, and how to tell when complexity is earning its keep.
The fun part of architecture is the whiteboard. The costly part is the five years afterwards.
Everything here is written from the production side of the wall: what holds up when traffic spikes, what breaks on a migration, and which “elegant” patterns turn into 3am pages. Rewrites are almost always more expensive than the people proposing them think; services are almost always cheaper to draw than to run. The posts under this hub are the evidence I keep going back to.
§ Editor's picks
Start here
- Oct 2025 How I learned to stop worrying and love the monolith The modular monolith isn't a defeat - it's a design choice that keeps optionality open and the deploy story boring. Here's the case, with receipts.
- Dec 2025 Against the second system effect (again) Every rewrite I've watched die had the same warning signs. This is the checklist I now force every 'let's just rewrite it' conversation through.
§ Writing
All writing on architecture
- Mar 2026 Multi-tenant recruitment platforms, or how I learned to love identity Talentera served enterprises and governments on one codebase. The data model survived years of tenancy demands because identity + access were first-class.
- Nov 2025 Wikipedia runs on boring code, and that's the lesson Three years at Wikimedia: the systems serving half the planet are unglamorous PHP, careful caching, and operational culture - not architecture-astronaut stuff.
- Apr 2025 Healthcare software is mostly paperwork you can't see Years building EHRs taught me the visible UI is 15% of what makes a hospital system work. The other 85% is audit, regulation, and wire formats.
- Jan 2025 Event-driven credit assessment: what it actually means What shipping AI-assisted lending workflows inside a regulated fintech backend actually looks like - Kafka, compliance, and the honest end of the story.
- Nov 2024 Founding AFAQ: What It Takes to Ship an EHR at 27 I founded a healthcare software company in Amman, managed 12 engineers, and shipped a cardiac hospital EHR in KSA. Here's what that actually looked like.
- Oct 2024 What HL7 Integration at a Cancer Centre Actually Looks Like I integrated King Hussein Cancer Centre with Jordan's national EHR via HL7 v2. Here's what the wire format looks like and why it's harder than it sounds.
- Sep 2024 HAKEEM: Rolling Out a National EHR at 22 I spent three years building HAKEEM, Jordan's national EHR built on VistA. Here's what rolling out to four hospitals actually looked like from inside.
- Jul 2024 What multi-tenant actually means when governments use it Building Elevatus: an AI-powered hiring platform where a government ministry and a retail chain shared the same codebase and nothing could break.
- Jun 2024 TCL/TK in production in 2018 How I shipped microservices and BPMN workflows on top of a TCL/TK core running on AOL servers, and why that was the right call.
- May 2024 GWT + Spring Boot: a 2013 retrospective I was doing type-safe full-stack Java when TypeScript was a 1.0 RC. GWT is gone now. Spring Boot is everywhere. Here's what that era actually felt like.
- Jan 2024 Java 6 to 17: what each version actually changed A working engineer's retrospective on 15 years of Java versions - not the spec, but what actually changed how I write code day to day.
- Jul 2020 Building prescription software during a pandemic What the e-prescription backend actually looked like in 2020: legacy pharmacy integrations, RabbitMQ, and engineering under pandemic pressure.
- May 2020 Integrating Mobile.de, Amazon, and eBay in eight weeks What marketplace integration archaeology looks like up close: three different inventory models, two months, and one unified domain schema to rule them all.
§ Related