Under Deconstruction: The State of Shopify’s Monolith

The engineering team at Shopify discuss the state of their Rails monolith, how it has evolved over time, the lessons they’ve learned and what is in store for the future. Most of the information is relevant for Rails developers working in large systems, with large teams.

As part of their efforts to make their monolith more effective, they are introducing a newly-open sourced tool: Packwerk. The objective is to enforce modularity, through the use of static analysis.

Writing a book: is it worth it?

Martin Kleppmann discusses openly the economics of writing his book: Designing Data-Intensive Applications. The book has been one of my favorite technical books. The book has generated almost $500,000. It involved working on it for years – one of them without any other income, speaking at more than 50 conferences promoting the book, and was helped in no small part because of Kleppmann’s well deserved presence and reputation in the field.