We build systems of lasting value. Through our work, we have come to value:
Questioning fundamentals over accepting convention
Essential simplicity over feature accumulation
Adaptable boundaries over rigid integration
Deliberate governance over passive decay
Designed replaceability over endless extension
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
The following principles expand on our core values and guide our practice:
Build on bedrock, not fashion or convenience.
- Question inherited constraints and derive solutions from first principles
- Make critical invariants explicit, testable, and continuously verified through testing or correct-by-construction approaches
- Designate one clear authority (person, team, or specification) for each vital component (e.g., core services, data models, critical interfaces)
- Track the provenance of what truly matters, discovering its scope through iterative refinement
Tailor this discipline to your domain criticality, regulatory requirements, and verification costs.
Key tension: Depth versus delivery: balancing rigorous questioning against pragmatic timelines.
The best design removes, rather than adds.
- Give each component a singular, focused purpose
- Separate domain logic from technical infrastructure
- Include only what serves core objectives: strategic minimalism
- Optimize for human cognition in every interface
Tailor this discipline to your team size, system complexity, and user requirements.
Key tension: Simplicity versus adaptability: finding the essential complexity that enables future evolution.
Clarity emerges from thoughtful containment.
- Define contracts between components that can be automatically verified
- Hide what will change; expose what will endure
- Group code by change patterns, initially through logical cohesion, then refined by empirical observation
- Make dependencies explicit, minimal, and unidirectional
Tailor this discipline to your system lifespan, team distribution, and change frequency.
Key tension: Isolation versus integration: balancing autonomous evolution against cohesive operation.
Without deliberate care, excellence crumbles into expedience.
- Establish clear decision processes before implementation begins
- Embed architectural principles in development workflows with feedback loops to maintain their relevance
- Verify through contracts, complementing rather than replacing integration testing
- Measure architectural health continuously
- Evolve governance structures as organizations and risk profiles change
Tailor this discipline to your team structure, compliance needs, and organizational maturity.
Key tension: Rigor versus agility: preventing decay without creating bureaucratic barriers.
Today's elegant solution becomes tomorrow's legacy constraint.
- Make components easy to replace, not infinitely flexible
- Separate processing logic from the state it manipulates, balanced with architectural simplicity
- Pay only for what you use: scale resources with demand and eliminate idle capacity
- Preserve essential history (business state transitions, architectural decisions, and compliance trails) while embracing transient execution
Tailor this discipline to your business rhythm, market dynamism, and operational constraints.
Key tension: Ephemerality versus continuity: enabling change without sacrificing stability.
Applying these disciplines is an iterative journey, not a destination. Start where you are:
- Begin with: Clear contracts between focused components, empirical module boundaries, and appropriate governance
- When scaling: Add automated verification, externalize state, and establish health metrics
- For resilience: Focus on replaceability, state/processing separation, and immutable event history
Measure success through:
- Reduced change failure rate
- Decreased time to implement new capabilities
- Improved team autonomy and velocity
- Enhanced system adaptability to changing requirements
Greatness in architecture isn't measured by theoretical elegance but by sustained value delivery through inevitable change. Systems endure when they adapt, not when they resist. Build less, build better, and build for replacement. These principles, thoughtfully tailored to your context, create systems that serve their purpose, respect human capacity, maintain integrity, and gracefully embrace the only constant: change itself.
For deeper exploration: Each discipline has established patterns and practices like CRDTs and Sagas for reconciliation, Event Sourcing for history preservation, Consumer-Driven Contracts for interface verification, and rapid experimentation techniques for discovering essential complexity that provide concrete implementation paths.