John Vester

For a few years now, I’ve tried to identify frameworks, products, and services that allow technologists to maintain their focus on extending the value of their intellectual property. This continues to be a wonderful journey for me, filled with unique learning opportunities. The engineer in me recently wondered if there was a situation where I could find a secondary benefit for an existing concept that I’ve talked about before. In other words, could I identify

In my previous article, Managing Architectural Tech Debt, I talked about understanding and managing architectural technical debt. Architectural technical debt is the often ignored, but ironically, one of the most damaging, categories of technical debt. In this article, I want to dive deeper into one way to manage architectural technical debt (and technical debt as a whole)—architectural observability (AO). AO is a new category of observability that I believe is just as important, if not more so, as application

When I think about technical debt, I still remember the first application I created that made me realize the consequences of an unsuitable architecture. It happened back in the late 1990s, when I was first getting started as a consultant. The client had requested use of the Lotus Notes platform to build a procurement system for their customers. Using the Lotus Notes client and a custom application, end-users could make requests that would be tracked by the