I build software, as a career and as a hobby. I collect and archive all kinds of media. I'm a music lover & mixer & snob. All in pursuit of the Good Life.
The private platform behind my AI assistant, my smart home, my music, and my live streams. Read how it grew from an idea into the platform that runs this site.
At work, 2026–present
Enabling Relationship Managers to do less busywork and close more deals with the power of Generative AI.
July 2026, 2 hr 4 min
July 2025, 30 min
June 2025, 25 min
April 2025, 38 min
I didn't expect to write a follow up to my post on architecture, organization, and ownership so soon, but I had a new use case come up that I couldn't pass up discussing. Here's a story of how we architected a set of infrastructure not just to ensure delivery and best practices, but also to ensure that maintainability was as simple as possible for the responsible team.
A few months ago I was faced with an architectural question from a team I was helping with their cloud deployments. They were developing a data processing solution that wanted to hook into a shared S3 bucket, owned by another team, which was already integrated into its own system. We deployed a decentralized solution to Production and it worked smoothly. That is, until a few weeks later when the notifications suddenly stopped flowing. The investigation and resolution of this issue revealed a lot about the architecture and the organization that influenced it.
As applications grow more and more complex, they may have to call an increasing number of external web APIs. As we build more features, we may depend on servies that we do not control, for the sake of gaining functionality we wouldn't be able to implement ourselves. That's great! What's not so great is when one of those services goes down, or has a major breaking change, or goes away altogether. Then, if we have not planned correctly, we may completely break our app with no immediate fix available. This is why I propose that to retain complete control over user experience, it is important that we maintain complete control over every external web call that goes in and out of our app.