Thoughtworks Tech Radar 27

Notes and thoughts about the 27th volume of the Thoughtworks Tech Radar.

Techniques

Hold

Satellite workers without "remote native".

• Remote workers are starting to be exluded again from meetings etc. as we move into a more hybrid model.
• With remote workers, it's easy to add more people than is necessary to meetings.
• People remoted into a meeting room can't always hear everything being said.

Superficial cloud native.

• There's a return to the "lift and shift" of deploying monoliths on top of cloud vendor services as opposed to rethinking to maximise the value of cloud architecture.
• Elasticity is a key feature of true "cloud native"
• Thought experiment: can I turn it off automatically if it's not under load?

Assess

CUPID

• A follow-on from "SOLID"
• Dan Terhorst-North's attempt to describe "properties" over "principles"
• Composable: plays well with others
• Unix philosophy: does one thing well
• Predictable: does what you expect
• Idiomatic: feels natural
• Domain-based: the solution domain models the problem domain in language and structure
• Properties lead to "joyful" coding.

Adopt

Team Cognitive Load

• Comes from "Team Topologies"
• Measure the amount of knowledge needed for a team to get things done
• For example, a "front end" team might need to understand the whole business if they're the front layer to everything else
• Seems to feed better into cross-functional, vertical teams that own a domain slice, but across multiple technologies (e.g. microservices)

Tools

Trial

Excalidraw

• Online, collaborative whiteboard
• Makes diagrams look rough and hand-drawn

xbar for build monitoring

• Build failures on the Mac menu bar

Assess

Teller

• Puts secrets in environment variables
• Uses multiple sources

Hold

Online services for formatting or parsing code

• Using online JSON/YAML formatters
• Pasting potentially sensitive info into 3rd parties
• JSON from log files could have personal information -- would be a GDPR violation or even exporting of personal data if the service is hosted in another country

Platforms

Adopt

Backstage

• Facilitates finding documentation for APIs (API Catalogue)
• Uses Markdown TechDocs
• Delegates writing of docs to the local repo, but centralises the discovery
• Can enable one-click quickstarts for projects
• Includes Kubernetes monitoring and management (from a service view, not a K8s admin view)
• There's quite a lot to it so it needs some management for rolling it out

Assess

Dragonfly

• Alternative to Redis
• Uses new ring buffer algorithms
• Still uses LRU for evictions
• Provisional cache mechanism avoids high churn and thundering herd after outage

OrioleDB

• New storage engine for PostgreSQL
• Designed for SSD and NVRAM (original Postgres engine optimised for hard drives)

IAM Roles Anywhere

• Get temporary credentials to AWS services from outside of AWS

Languages and Frameworks

Assess

JonRunr

• Alternative to Quartz
• Job runner with built-in dashboard
• Schedule tasks and cron jobs via lambda expressions

Stable Diffusion

• Generates images from text prompts like DALL-E
• Raises more questions around the ethics of using artists' work and style
• More broadly, crowd-sourcing data with permission raises questions

Carbon Aware SDK

• Helps software to use less carbon

Adopt

Kotest

• Previously KotlinTest
• Sensible default over JUnit
• Property testing built in
• Fluent DSL
• Rich matchers