architecture The Five-Minute Rule: A Heuristic for Deciding What Belongs in Cache josedacruz, October 24, 2026October 24, 2026 TL;DR: The “five-minute rule” is an old database heuristic that says: cache something if the cost of keeping it in memory is lower than the cost of re-fetching it, given how often it gets used. The actual “five minutes” number from the 1980s doesn’t matter anymore — what still matters… Continue Reading
architecture The Reorg Tax: Why Every Reorg Quietly Resets Your Architecture Decisions josedacruz, October 23, 2026October 23, 2026 TL;DR: A reorg can quietly undo months of careful architecture work even when not a single line of code changes. The danger isn’t the new org chart itself — it’s that the people who understood why a system was built a certain way leave, and the people who inherit it… Continue Reading
architecture Essential Reading: The Pragmatic Programmer — Small Habits That Keep Codebases From Rotting josedacruz, October 21, 2026October 21, 2026 TL;DR: The Pragmatic Programmer argues that software craftsmanship is less about knowing the fanciest tools and more about building good daily habits — caring about your code, automating the boring parts, and catching small problems before they rot into big ones. For IT professionals, it’s a toolbox of concrete practices… Continue Reading
architecture GitHub Weekly: This Week in Rust (October 12 – October 18, 2026) josedacruz, October 19, 2026October 19, 2026 TL;DR: This week’s GitHub Weekly turns the spotlight on Rust (a systems programming language prized for speed and memory safety without a garbage collector). The standout theme: Rust has become the default choice for AI agent infrastructure — sandboxes, inference engines, and search tools built for speed — right alongside… Continue Reading
architecture Essential Reading: Clean Architecture — Why Dependencies Should Only Point One Way josedacruz, October 15, 2026October 15, 2026 TL;DR: Robert C. Martin’s “Clean Architecture” argues that the most expensive mistake in software isn’t a bug — it’s letting your business logic get welded to a framework, a database, or a UI you’ll eventually want to rip out. The fix is drawing firm boundaries so the stuff that makes… Continue Reading
architecture Essential Reading: Domain-Driven Design — Taming Complexity With a Shared Language josedacruz, October 13, 2026October 13, 2026 TL;DR: Eric Evans’ Domain-Driven Design argues that software should be modeled directly around the real-world business concepts it serves, using the business’s own language, rather than around whatever data structures happen to be convenient. For IT professionals, it’s the clearest, most durable answer to the question of why some codebases… Continue Reading
architecture GitHub Weekly: 10 Rising Stars You Haven’t Heard Of Yet (October 5 – October 11, 2026) josedacruz, October 13, 2026October 13, 2026 TL;DR: This week we’re skipping the usual overall-trending list and digging into repos that are brand-new (created in the last 30 days) but have already picked up real traction — genuine rising stars rather than the usual mega-projects. The theme that kept showing up: fast, narrow “decision” models as an… Continue Reading
architecture GitHub Weekly: MCP Tools Trending Right Now (September 28 – October 4, 2026) josedacruz, October 6, 2026October 6, 2026 TL;DR: This week’s angle is MCP (Model Context Protocol) — the standard that lets AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT plug into outside data and services. The repos below split into two camps: tools for wiring ChatGPT or Codex into other agent setups, and MCP servers that give an agent… Continue Reading
architecture The Bulkhead Pattern: Why One Slow Dependency Shouldn’t Sink the Whole Ship josedacruz, October 2, 2026October 2, 2026 TL;DR: The bulkhead pattern means giving each dependency — a downstream API, a database, a queue — its own separate pool of resources instead of making everyone share one big pool. That way, when one dependency gets slow or fails, it can only eat its own pool, not every other… Continue Reading
architecture Essential Reading: A Philosophy of Software Design — Fighting Complexity One Module at a Time josedacruz, September 30, 2026September 30, 2026 TL;DR: John Ousterhout argues that software complexity doesn’t arrive as one big mistake — it accumulates in small increments, one shortcut at a time, until a codebase becomes hard to change without breaking something else. His fix is to design “deep” modules: pieces of code with a simple interface that… Continue Reading