There are a number of different roles & responsibilities of architects in software development companies and elsewhere. Their positions sound similar and their responsibilities partially overlap as well. But before we look at their differences and values, let’s dig into what architecture is and what architects are. According to Wikipedia…

Right before the Covid lock down, I went to the O’Reilly Architecture conference in NYC with the intent on recharging my batteries and learning about some new and innovative architectures and tools that could aid Diligent. This wasn’t my first time attending the conference and, in fact, the last time…

Imagine you are driving a racecar. Instead of making a pit stop to change tires or refuel, you need to switch cars while driving or change the tires without slowing down. This is a very common analogy used to describe what it’s like to run software in a modern production…

I was asked recently how my team first established a functional remote culture, and realized that it started on the first day we were onboarded to the team — everyone introduced themselves via instant messaging, email, and phone calls. …

This is the story of how the Notification Service performs automated API testing on the Paved Road, Diligent’s internal CI/CD toolset. From the onset of the project, there were goals to achieve high reliability and quality. Notification Service will reach those goals by running tests early and often. The following…

At Diligent, we build thousands of virtual machines a year, including complex clusters for MySQL, Couchbase, SQL Server and Kubernetes, and we do it on-demand and in just a few minutes. But it wasn’t always that way. Sometime around the release of VMware vCenter version 5.5, in 2013 or possibly…

When implementing component tests, which only test one service in isolation, it often is necessary to “mock” downstream services. That means the tests need to know about downstream requests of the service they test. This post shows how to create reliable test doubles with the builder pattern. It is one…