Explained: The Four Architecture Domains

A customer walks into an Aldermont branch and applies for a mortgage. From their side it is one action: fill in a form, hand over documents, wait for a decision. Inside the bank, that single request touches almost everything the organization is made of. It invokes a business process someone designed. It reads and writes data whose meaning someone had to define. It runs through software systems someone built or bought. And all of that executes on… Read More

Explained: Enterprise Architecture

The bank wants to launch a new instant-payments feature in the mobile app. The head of retail digital scopes it out and hits a wall on day one. To move money in real time, the feature needs to read a customer's live balance. But there is no single place that holds "the customer's balance." There are three. Aldermont Bank runs three core banking systems, one for each bank it used to be. Checking accounts opened before 2008 live o… Read More

Explained: Agentic AI

It is 11:40 pm and a deploy is blocked by one failing test. You paste the stack trace into a chatbot. It suggests a fix. You copy the fix into your editor, rerun the suite, get a new error, and paste that back. Nine round trips later, the test finally passes. The model did the thinking, but you did everything else: running commands, reading output, deciding whether to keep going. Now picture the same night with a coding agent. You type one senten… Read More

Explained: Kerberos

It is 9 a.m. on a Monday. You type your password once to log into your work laptop. Then the day just happens: the shared drive opens, the intranet loads, Outlook connects, you print to the machine down the hall, you SSH into a build server. Not one of those systems asked for your password. Somehow, they all know who you are. That quiet magic is, in most corporate networks, Kerberos . It has been running underneath Windows Active Directory since 2… Read More

Architecture: NATS

A microservice publishes an order event. Three other services need to know about it: inventory has to decrement stock, billing has to charge the card, and shipping has to queue a label. In a lot of systems, that fan-out means standing up a broker, provisioning disks, tuning partitions, and running a coordination service alongside it. Then you check the memory footprint and realize the messaging layer is heavier than the services it connects. NATS … Read More