Resources

Blogs & Newsletters

Adam Bien's Weblog

Java EE / Jakarta EE insights from a veteran consultant and developer.

AI Rails

A curated resource hub tracking the latest in AI guidelines by Adam Bien.

Tech World with Milan

Newsletter by Milan Jovanović covering software architecture, system design, and engineering practices with deep-dive articles on real-world patterns and trade-offs.

Reads

Choose Boring Technology

Teams have a limited budget of innovation tokens and should default to well-understood technology for most decisions, spending novelty only where it truly matters. — Dan McKinley

The Majestic Monolith

Defends the monolithic architecture for small teams, arguing that microservices' coordination overhead rarely pays off until scale and team size genuinely demand it. — DHH

What Is a Modular Monolith?

A single deployable with strict module boundaries, independent data, and explicit contracts — a middle ground between big-ball-of-mud monoliths and microservices. — Milan Jovanović

Simple Made Easy

Distinguishes simple (un-braided, one role) from easy (familiar, near-at-hand), arguing that simplicity — not ease — is the foundation of reliable, maintainable software. — Rich Hickey

Talk Transcripts

Full transcripts of talks by Rich Hickey and others — Hammock Driven Development, Spec-ulation, Maybe Not, and more — readable offline without slides or video.

The Founder's Playbook

A guide to building AI-native startups, remapping the traditional Idea → MVP → Launch → Scale lifecycle for 2026 AI capabilities. — Anthropic

Standards & Specs

RFC 2119

Defines key requirement level keywords (MUST, SHALL, SHOULD, MAY, etc.) used in technical specifications to indicate obligation, recommendation, and optionality.

EARS

Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax — sentence templates for writing unambiguous natural-language requirements, e.g. "When [trigger], the [system] shall [action]".

Semantic Versioning

A versioning scheme using MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH that conveys compatibility intent — MAJOR for breaking changes, MINOR for backwards-compatible features, PATCH for bug fixes.

BPMN

Business Process Model and Notation — a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a workflow. Web-based tooling at bpmn.io.

Architecture

C4 Model

A hierarchical approach to diagramming software architecture at four levels of abstraction: Context, Container, Component, and Code.

Laws of Software Engineering

A curated collection of laws, principles, and heuristics — Conway's Law, Hyrum's Law, Postel's Law, and more — with concise explanations.

PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrapper

Exposes external data sources as virtual tables queryable with standard SQL — useful for CSV files, cross-instance queries, and bridging NoSQL stores or REST APIs via Multicorn adapters.