🌟 Editor's Note
It’s that time of the year. The days are getting longer, the sun is out, and conferences are in full swing.
We’re starting off this issue with a special one from the team. Oliver (our Head of Design) wrote a piece on Adopting ADRs on Enterprise. Many of these insights came from conversations with architects as we were building decision records in IcePanel.
Luca’s episode with James Eastham dropped, with a deep dive into his career journey, from support to architect to developer advocate. Careers are rarely linear. Embrace the chaos.
The IcePanel crew will be heading to Antwerp next month for DDD. We’ll also be hosting a small party for architects at the coolest cocktail bar. Be sure to RSVP for some good vibes.
📋 Adopting ADRs in Enterprise
By the talented Oliver Windle (Head of Design at IcePanel)
For anyone who has spent the past few years repeatedly giving LLMs the context behind something before it can give you a useful answer, then I’m sure you’ve come to understand just how easy it is for information to become siloed inside even a small organisation and maybe known only by you.
In enterprise organisations, this unintentional information gatekeeping not only means team members have to spend time running around searching for the right person to understand why an architectural decision was made three years ago. A lot of the time, the reasoning behind those decisions has eroded away or been forgotten completely.
This isn’t good, and it’s certainly not useful if you intend to dust off your auth flow and consider something new, but need to check in with those who built the original version. Those previous decisions may be propping up other architectural decisions. It’s like a stack of fragile playing cards, ready to tumble at the slightest gust of wind.
There’s a whole world of ways in which teams may choose to share why important decisions were made. Maybe in long-form text in a word editor, maybe in a markdown file tied to a repo, a Slack thread, an email or perhaps a mixture of all of them (which is unfortunately most common). You get the idea, these decisions and most importantly all of that context is scattered, and often dependent on the right person still being around.
That’s one reason I’m so sold on ADRs (Architectural Decision Records). Designed to serve as lightweight records of the context behind architecture decisions, ADRs are a log of important decisions made by a team, and the context that surrounds them.
🤓 Dear Architects, Episode 4: How to become an architect
James shares his career journey from answering support calls in northern England to advising some of the largest companies at AWS, and becoming a developer advocate at Datadog. A super fun chat with plenty of nuggets from reframing imposter syndrome, habits for improving architectural decision-making, and (of course) his thoughts on LLMs.
🤓 Reads + finds
How Architects Should Collaborate With Product Managers? A practical guide to working with Product Managers before priorities harden into backlog work, so architecture supports real product direction. Read article.
The C4 Model - Beyond The Basics. Simon Brown’s talk from YOW! 2025. Learn how to model microservices, message-driven architectures, and scaling the C4 model. Watch video.
DDD vs Agile. Despite being seemingly different things, Dan Kantic argues that the combo of the two is a false marriage. Agile works for small, simple problems. Complex problems require a DDD approach. Read article.
Delivering Virtual Burgers, One Instance at a Time with Multi-Tenancy. McDonald’s strategy to roll out multi-tenancy allowed them to scale microservices and deliver features faster. A delicious read. Read article.
Anyone going back to monolith? A decade later and we’re back at square one. Read the discussion on Reddit.
😎 Chill-out with us in Antwerp
Friends and architects,
We’ll be heading to Antwerp for DDD and are hosting a small hangout at Marigold (we heard they have the best cocktails in town 🍸 ).
We’d love to see you!
(Drinks, food, and fun on us)
Stay chill,