Sharing a database across services is the fastest path to a distributed monolith. This post explains the principle, the common rationalizations for breaking it, and the patterns that make per-servi...

CQRS and Event Sourcing are often mentioned together but solve distinct problems. This post separates them, explains when each is warranted, and gives a concrete implementation example in an order ...

The commercial case for MACH. This post argues that composing specialized vendors (Algolia for search, Stripe for payments, Contentful for CMS) produces better outcomes than buying an integrated su...

REST is widely used but poorly practiced. This post gives a concrete, opinionated ruleset for designing APIs that are predictable, consistent, and easy to consume.

In a distributed system, a slow downstream service can take down everything upstream. The circuit breaker pattern is the standard defense — this post explains it concretely with state diagrams and ...

A MACH platform is only as good as its deployment pipeline. This post covers how to structure CI/CD so that backend services ship independently without silently breaking frontend consumers.

You cannot debug what you cannot observe. This post covers the three pillars of observability in a distributed system and shows how to implement them without drowning in data.

Sephora’s shift to headless is a textbook example of the H in MACH delivering real business value — unified content across web, mobile, and in-store without rebuilding each channel separately.

Nike is one of the most-cited real-world MACH implementations. This post analyzes how they decomposed their e-commerce platform to handle flash sale traffic spikes without full-system outages.

Named after the compartments in a ship’s hull, the bulkhead pattern isolates thread pools, connection pools, and resources per downstream dependency. This post shows how to apply it so a failing se...