Through the stack 1.24 (Week 44)

This is "Through the Stack," a weekly list of links relating to topics relevant to Lead developers (actual or aspiring) working with an internet-related product.
Many lead developers, tech lead, and staff engineers have their hands in many projects and influence many layers in their organizations. This publication aims to share relevant thoughts and content to such profiles.
If you have comments or content to suggest, please reach out to us by email through-the-stack@imfiny.com.

This week ...

We have a bit of a flurry of links with quite a few for leaders: some on DDD and related topics and some on management.

There is plenty to read on the Software Engineering side too, not only about Ruby.

Leadership and product

I have found a set of slides from Christian Soronellas from his talk about Design Patterns and DDD. There is also another set of slides on CQRS from him, but they are more challenging to follow without the actual talk.

I keep hearing and reading good things about the Learning Domain-Driven Design book by Vladik Khononov. And in a similar topic, David Adamo Jr. published an article on Event driven architecture.

I came across another Management book that might be of interest: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. I haven't read it yet, it's very recent (early November 2022). If you have read it please ping me with your feedback.

On the management side, Stripe has just announced a significant layoff of employees. The details of the why and how it will happen were made public by the company through a post signed by the founders. While it's a tough call for any company, the way they are doing it is pretty different from other companies in the headlights recently. The severance package and the process described showing more care for their future ex-employees than others. Food for thought.

A great, quick reminder of how one can change perspective on some items at work: HexDevs@Twitter.

Software Engineering

A teammate shared an interesting link about Clickhouse use at Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/log-analytics-using-clickhouse/.

In other news: Sidekiq 7.0 is out. You can find more about the changes in the announcement. Speaking of which, one change is the ability to embed the Sidekiq process within the web process, as demonstrated here by @kirill_shevch. As we both point out in the thread, it's a handy solution to get started but not to scale.

To stick to Ruby: a good quick tip about Ruby#Enumerable. If you like minitest but want a bit more without going to RSpec you can check out Maxitest.

Finally, for tests and the TDD approach, @germsvel has published an interesting thread of tweets on BDD.

Product discoveries

Recent news about Stripe laying off employees (see the Leadership section) has pointed me (once again) towards one alternative to Stripe: Adyen. While offering fewer services, it seems to be covering all the basics for payments and a bit more. Potentially an excellent alternative to Stripe or Paypal/Braintree.

Have you been using it? I'd be happy to hear or read about your experience. Ping me.

One of my mentors has recently reminded me of AppSumo. They usually offer ways to get pretty good discounts on plenty of services out there. They also do something similar for courses now. And, going through the list of courses on offer, I saw there was a whole lot "Free".

Audio discoveries

What would work be without a soundtrack? Spotify suggested me a couple of interesting tracks this week:

Epilogue

This is the end for this week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. There are quite some good reads, and they might help you in your day-to-day work and beyond.

Don't hesitate to ping me through https://twitter.com/ThomasRiboulet_ or through through-the-stack@imfiny.com with content suggestions or comments.

Who are we, by the way?

This content is written and published by Imfiny/CloudPier22, a consulting company based in France. We do Ruby software engineering and DevOps in the Cloud (AWS, GCP, and others). We also train and support teams in their journeys to grow code, infrastructure, and practices (production engineering, incident management, retrospectives, ...).