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Steven Stuart

Steven Stuart

Software Architect

Software architect with 15 years of experience building complex distributed systems.

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Articles

Entitlements Are a Domain, Not a Feature Flag

Gating paid features with flag segments is easy to start and hard to undo. Which customers are owed a feature is a commercial decision that needs its own owner, audit trail, and offline rules, so it belongs in its own domain. A flag can hold it only as a deliberate stopgap, with an owner and a written trigger for replacing it.

The API Gateway Shouldn't Know Your Business

Business rules end up in the API gateway because it's the easiest place to apply a rule to every request, and there they lose their owner, miss traffic that skips the gateway, and leave the domain's tests. Keep a rule in the gateway only if the gateway team could change it correctly on its own, and admit anything else only as debt with an owner and a removal date.

Your Reads Should Not Design Your Writes

API updates that send a wide body can't reliably tell an omitted field from a cleared one, whatever the HTTP method, and patch formats push the fix onto every client. Normalizing the write surface avoids both, keeping reads as composed views and writes as small resources any client can replace whole.

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Study Guides

AAA Cycle: Align-Agree-Apply

A guiding discipline for architects that works inside any SDLC methodology: align with the need through human connection, agree on how to meet it, apply what was agreed, and go back to an earlier phase when reality breaks the agreement.

AAA Cycle: Phase 1 - Align with the Need

The first AAA phase: stakeholder discovery, requirements and architectural characteristics, constraints and risks, a Go, Pivot, or No-Go call built from an effort estimate and a risk tier, the project charter, and the test that alignment is real before moving to Agree.

AAA Cycle: Phase 2 - Agree to the Plan

The second AAA phase: architecture design and ADRs, validating the design against its top quality attributes, documentation matched to risk, proofs of concept, quality strategy and SLOs, planning to an appetite, and reaching real agreement among stakeholders and with the team.

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Case Studies

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