Skip to content

Frank on Software.

Notes on software design, architecture, domain-driven design and distributed systems. 26 posts, written when I learn something worth sharing.

Latest

1 min read

New language, new direction, new content

Over the last couple of years, this blog has gone stale. I intend to change that and produce more content when I learn something new. This new content will still cover a lot of the things you're used to: software design, architecture, domain-driven design, and distributed…

2022

  1. Encapsulating interactions with the outside world in your domain model.

    In my ever-lasting battle against anemic domain models I've developed a preference on how to integrate with the external concerns. In this post I'd like to show an alternative, a strategy on how to keep encapsulating behaviour wile interacting with the outside world.

    4 min readSoftware Design

  2. Use a message envelope

    Event-driven architectures have various styles of communication. In my previous post I described a couple of event types you may see in these kinds of architectures.

    7 min readEvent-Driven Architectureevent sourcing

  3. The different types of events in event-driven systems

    Event-driven systems come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The obvious commonality is; they all use events to communicate information. These events come in many shapes and sizes, and determining what goes into an event has an immense impact on the design of your system.

    6 min readSoftware DesignEvent-Driven Architecture

  4. Reliable event dispatching using a transactional outbox

    Using events in a system is great, but how do you know for sure if you've reliably dispatched your events? The transportation of events needs to be done reliably while maintaining overall system consistency, be it eventual or immediately.

    5 min read

  5. Flysystem 3.0.0 is released

    On the 13th of January 2022, version 3.0.0 of Flysystem was released. The library ships a couple new methods on the main filesystem and adapter interfaces, making it a breaking change that cause a major version increase.

    3 min readPHPFlysystem

2021

  1. Where does my validation live?

    This is a question I've received over and over again, a question that does not have a single answer. Sometimes when I explain how I approach this I get surprised reactions, so I figure I might as well share it in a blog post and see what other people think.

    8 min readvalidationSoftware Design

  2. Ensuring data(base) consistency during concurrent requests

    Bugs caused by race conditions can be a huge source of frustration. They are difficult to identify and often difficult to remedy. As part of my day to day job at Mollie, guarding against data inconsistencies is always top of mind.

    8 min readConcurrencyParallelism

  3. Setting up a TypeScript multi-package mono-repo for @scoped/packages.

    How to use NPM workspaces for scoped packages.

    5 min readtypescript

  4. Back the func off, this is my abstraction!

    Integrating services over API's exposes your application to a range of possible failures. At scale, any network interaction can and will fail. Implementing a retry mechanism is a common approach to increase fault tolerance.

    8 min readPHPSoftware Design

2020

  1. A new major version of Flysystem

    For those who missed it, a new major version of Flysystem was released on the 24th of November. A new major version allows you break with the past for the sake of the future, which is exactly what I've done. For the second version of Flysystem I went back to the drawing board.

    3 min read

  2. Testing without mocking frameworks.

    Over the years, my coding practices have changed a lot. From hacking away until it works to TDD/BDD/DDD and everything in between. One of the biggest changes in my developer career has been when, why, and how I test my code.

    9 min readPHPTesting

2019

  1. Setting up docs with Tailwind CSS & GitHub Pages.

    To me, Tailwind CSS is one of the the most enjoyable tools to build documentation websites. It's quick, it's easy, and it gets the job done well. The library has taken the world by storm, and that doesn't surprise me one bit.

    7 min read

  2. Type-safe stream processing in TypeScript

    > This post contains a lot of back-story about how this all came about, you can skip ahead if you only care about the code. In case you haven't worked with TypeScript before: TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that enhances the language by providing optional static typing.

    6 min readtypescript

2018

  1. Array destructuring in PHP

    In my day to day job I write in a number of programming languages. The majority of my time is spent writing PHP but I very much enjoy writing other languages, such as Go and Javascript, too! One of the things I like the most about JavaScript, and PHP also to some extent, is how…

    3 min readPHPSyntax

  2. Being in control of time in PHP

    When developers talk about the infrastructural boundaries or external dependencies they often talk about databases and third-party integration. They're the first thing we'll put behind an interface so we can stub them out during our tests. This gives us some control over them.

    4 min readPHPTesting

  3. Regaining trust in your test suite with Docker.

    Docker, and containerised services in general, have brought a lot to the world of software development. While not everybody is (or ever should be) using docker as their deployment method, it's usefulness far exceeds being just a platform to run services on in production.

    3 min readPHPTesting

2017

  1. Partitioning for concurrency in synchronous business processes.

    The PHP landscape is getting more and more diverse. The typical PHP + MySQL combination is no longer the only way of doing things. Applications in PHP are not just fancy database wrappers anymore.

    8 min readPHPData Engineering

  2. Battle Log: Symfony Routing performance considerations.

    Last week I took a deep dive into Symfony's Routing Component. A project I worked on suffered from a huge performance penalty caused by a routing mistake. This lead me on the path to discovering some interesting performance considerations.

    7 min readPHPSymfony

2016

  1. How a 20mb data-set brought down a 14gb ElasticSearch cluster.

    For a client project we are using ElasticSearch (ES) as one of our read-models. The use-case was pretty straight forward and the amount of data was super small. However, our problems were pretty big.

    7 min readDevOpsElasticSearch

  2. Finally, file streams, and deferred execution in PHP.

    Cleaning up after yourself can be a tedious task. For example, closing file handlers after using them needs to be done. A programmer's life isn't all about the happy path. When things go pear-shaped you might end up duplicating cleanup code throughout your code.

    4 min readPHP

  3. "Scaling" Vagrant with NGINX Load Balancing

    A load-balanced vagrant setup, because why the hell not! Not all projects require more that one instance of your application to handle the demand. When you do, you want to be prepared. You'll want to know which steps you have to take and which limitations you'll encounter.

    7 min read

2015

  1. Pipelines, immutability and privates.

    A recent addition to the PHP League was the pipeline package, which allows you to compose sequential operations. One of the key aspects of the pipeline is that it's immutable. During the development of Pipeline, I learned a few lessons that I'd like to share with you.

    3 min readPHP

  2. Onboarding and Ansible Galaxy.

    When you start working on a new project, there are usually a couple of steps you'll need to follow to get up and running. This process is called on-boarding. One of the steps in this process is getting your local development environment setup.

    3 min readAnsibleDevOps

  3. Packages vs. Components: The Dependency Problem.

    The PHP landscape has fully transitioned into its Package Age™. Packagist is the main resource for retrieving new PHP packages: most frameworks split out packages from their main distribution to allow re-use outside of the framework. The world is a happy place.

    6 min readPHP

  4. Rendering ReactJS templates server-side.

    The last couple of months I've been working with ReactJS quite extensively. It's been a very rewarding and insightful journey. There is, however, one part that kept coming back to me: server-side rendering.

    7 min readReactJSPHP