SL#93 - Microservices: The Pattern Everyone Copied Wrong
Microservices were never about size. They were about who can deploy without asking permission - and most teams copied the topology and skipped the one property that mattered.
Clean Architecture is one good rule wearing four rings of costume. Keep the rule. The costume is optional, and most teams pay for it without knowing why.
SL#87 - Hexagonal Architecture, and the One Rule the Hexagon Hides
Ports and adapters is not a shape you draw or a folder layout you copy. It is a single rule about which way your dependencies point, and almost everyone who claims to use it has broken that rule.
SL#85 - Layered Architecture: The Default That Works
Every greenfield service drifts into controller, service, repository. People call it boring three-tier and reach for something fancier. The boredom is the feature.
The MVC your web framework ships is not the MVC that Trygve Reenskaug wrote down in 1979. What mutated and what survived tells you what the pattern was actually for, and why the Controller keeps falling apart.
SL#78 - What Design Patterns Actually Are (and When to Ignore Them)
A design pattern is not reusable code. It's a name for a recurring shape that a good solution takes under pressure. Knowing the difference is what separates engineers who use patterns from engineers who get used by them.
