Key Takeaways Here a style of thinking - and some questions - about software development is put forward. It is a personal practice in note-taking and communicating thoughts. The first step in software development is to run the application, not design or write the code. It was like this, since before Smalltalk. The code is just a representation of the running application. There are two major decisions to make in software development, deciding what to keep, deciding what things to leave out.

All the reduction in revenue comes from the code. All the lost opportunities and overdue time-to-market come from the code. The code causes long lead times. All the bugs come from the code. And for developers all the beautiful weekends, that you could be spent with your kids and your family, but weren’t so, come from the code. Code is a liability, not an asset. The functionality of it could be an asset, assuming you’re building something that someone is willing to pay for it.

In a Microservice Architecture, some services update an entity. A service that updates an entity, might need to send an event to a down-stream service, to inform it about the update. The problem is, these two actions - updating a database and sending a message to a queue - can not be guaranteed to be completed transactionally. What if updating the database fails, but a message be sent to the queue?

This is a work-in-progress - and will be so for some time. It is picturing how one could think about Software Development - one of many possible ways. Tradeoffs are made - the main goal here was/is to communicate. Niklas: Something feels broken about all that code we have. Edmond: Maybe. But aren’t you making money? Niklas: We do. But doing anything new is hard, changing or fixing stuff is hard, everything feels so slow, so ineffective.

I have stopped blogging at some point (for the third time). And many things happened during the last year, I decided to relocate to another country, experienced a multi-culture life & work atmosphere and tackled the ups and downs. Maybe I write about that experience someday. And start blogging again. I do not know yet. Squares A and B have the same color.