· 8 min read
We measure technical debt in our code. Operational debt lives between our systems, where processes converge only eventually, through people. What distributed systems engineering teaches us about paying it down.
· 11 min read
Part 2/2 - In agentic systems, the decision to stop is as important as the decision to act. The guardian pattern formalizes that decision as a typed, independent evaluator that preserves the actor's agency while enforcing safety and business-relevant constraints.
· 9 min read
Part 4/4 - A reference architecture for audit trails, written as an architecture decision record: transactional outbox, Merkle log, qualified timestamps, crypto-shredding and a masked access plane.
· 4 min read
Architecture standards usually offer two outcomes: comply, or get an exception. Real systems need a third option: a sanctioned, bounded deviation that keeps the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) target within reach.
· 5 min read
A customer switching banks is one decision on the outside and days of long-running, third-party-dependent work on the inside. How child workflows, signals, updates, Nexus and Kafka each earn their place — and where orchestration should stop.