My previous post was pickup and shared on Hacker News, there was lots of really good discussion in the comments, and there were a number of points raised which I thought would make a good follow up blog post. There were a few main themes in the comments: There was broad consensus that architecture diagrams are helpful/useful for teams There were lots of different tools/methods that people use for architecture diagrams, although a reasonable number have used/use C4 Diagrams are expensive or difficult to maintain Blog post about architecture diagrams, without any diagrams!

Earlier this year myself and a couple others at DrDoctor did some training in C4 Architecture modelling1. The trainer was really good and over a few sessions with him we got the hang of the method. We went onto use what we had learnt, meeting everything Thursday over the course of 3 months. We focused mainly on modelling our existing architecture into Level 1 (Context) and Level 2 (Container) diagrams. This process was enlightening and we all learnt a lot from it - that alone could easily be a couple of posts.

A little while ago now, my team at work was looking at improving the performance of a FHIR Server API. Thanks to Azure Workbooks, we’ve already been able to identify a bottleneck with the underlying data storage resource - CosmosDB. Now, as we explore options to enhance performance, we need a way to reliably benchmark the server. These benchmarks will help us measure the impact of any changes we make to the configuration and infrastructure.

With 2022 well underway I’ve realised it isn’t too late to set a couple of personal development goals for the remainder of the year. Last year I was working in the infrastructure team at DrDoctor. Over the course of the year I learnt many valuable things: Bicep (infrastructure as code) Azure DevOps pipelines Azure networking (virtual networks, subnets, how to isolate App Services and keep data private in a cloud first world) All of these areas of growth were infrastructure related, not terribly surprising given I was in the infra team.

This year I have been participating in the Advent of Code, a yearly (for obvious reasons) event where a new puzzle is released each day of Advent which requires some coding skills to solve. It has been fun so far and I’m sure it’s only going to get harder. It’s an excellent opportunity to practice some algorithm skills and also to learn some new things. The Day 4 challenge titled Giant Squid involved playing some games of bingo against a giant squid.

Cookie banners suck, and a lot of websites do them very badly. When I launched unravelled.dev I included Google Analytics since I wanted to know what posts were the most read, you know to give me an indication of what my audience was most interested in. However given that this is a developer centric blog I suspect that a good amount of visitors have browser based ad blockers or use something like NextDNS to block analytics from being collected.