Top all-time · #9
Martin Fowler
Personal blog · martinfowler.comprogrammingsystems
Martin Fowler's personal blog at martinfowler.com covers programming and systems. Since 2007, 1,483 different Hacker News readers have linked it 2,510 times, most often “Two Hard Things (2009)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Fowler's site for software design and architecture references, such as monolith-first, event sourcing, refactoring, testing and his catalog of enterprise patterns.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A website on building software effectively
Most-linked posts?
- Two Hard Things (2009)36 people · 43 mentions · first linked 2017-03-04
- Monolith First (2015)32 people · 36 mentions · first linked 2017-01-18
- Event Sourcing (2005)29 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2017-02-07
- The LMAX Architecture (2011)28 people · 34 mentions · first linked 2011-07-12
- The one true REST explanation27 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2010-03-18
- The LMAX Architecture (2011)26 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2017-02-08
- StranglerFig Application26 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2019-10-04
- Event Sourcing (2005)25 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2011-08-12
- MicroServices (2014)24 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2014-03-10
- Feature Toggles19 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2017-10-02
What Hacker News says?
Bias up front: I work at Google but am not speaking for Google. > involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. I don't see how this is involuntary. You are choosing to use the product. If you choose to use the product, yes, you may be exposed to features that the product has. If you don't want to be exposed to those features, the way to opt out is to not use the product. > What's the motivation? It lets the company incrementall…
Comment linking /articles/feature-toggles.html
on “Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID”Submitted Monolith First (2015) as a story · 820 points
HN discussionThe disruptor ring-buffer for providing lock-free parallelization for multiple readers/writers: https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html
Comment linking /articles/lmax.html
on “Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?”Submitted Software Architecture Guide as a story · 803 points
HN discussionI'd suggest going through all Uncle Bob Martin[1]s talks on clean code. He has a great article (2014), old, on why you may not want to build that framework at all[2] too: > Using a framework requires a significant commitment. By accepting the framework into your code, you surrender your control over the details that the framework manages. [...] > And yet despite the huge commitment you’ve made to the framework, the…
Comment linking /bliki/DomainDrivenDesign.html
on “We lost 54k GitHub stars”Submitted Technical Debt as a story · 610 points
HN discussionWell, I mentioned Fowler because of this: https://martinfowler.com/tags/clean%20code.html Though he and Uncle Bob agree on many of these things so one could replace one for the other in my comment, I think.
Comment linking /tags/clean%20code.html
on “Goodbye, Clean Code”Submitted LLM Voice as a story · 605 points
HN discussionhttp://martinfowler.com/bliki/ImmutableServer.html
Comment linking /bliki/ImmutableServer.html
on “I've Just Liberated My Modules”Submitted MonolithFirst as a story · 539 points
HN discussionI've seen this referred to as Chain of Thought. I've used it with great success a few times. https://martinfowler.com/articles/2023-chatgpt-xu-hao.html
Comment linking /articles/2023-chatgpt-xu-hao.html
on “Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context”Submitted Stepping Back from Speaking as a story · 517 points
HN discussionAnd let's not forget money. Martin Fowler has been (correctly) banging this drum for years: https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/money.html
Comment linking /eaaCatalog/money.html
on “Please put units in names”Submitted Serverless Architectures as a story · 477 points
HN discussionSure. I'd venture to say that integration tests should be fewer than unit tests, see hexagonal etc. Hopefully those external interfaces are also more stable, so they don't need to be run as often. I tend to use my integration tests also as characterization tests that verify the simulator/test-double I use for any external systems within my unit tests. See also: the testing pyramid[1] and "integrated tests are a scam…
Comment linking /bliki/TestPyramid.html
on “Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar”Submitted Is TDD Dead? (2014) as a story · 445 points
HN discussionHow can we see if this technique works? There are two methods try to know something: deduction and induction. First a little deduction. Let's try to be explicit about the theory behind this technique. It's safe to assume that the job will NOT consist mainly of cranking out binary tree inversions on whiteboards while being watched over. So obviously we're hoping to make a correlation with something else. Assuming the…
Comment linking /bliki/TwoHardThings.html
on “Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...”Submitted Monolith First (2015) as a story · 430 points
HN discussionThe time upgrading is not linear, it’s exponential. If it hurts, do it more often! https://martinfowler.com/bliki/FrequencyReducesDifficulty.ht...
Comment linking /bliki/FrequencyReducesDifficulty.html
on “Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised”Submitted Maximizing Developer Effectiveness as a story · 427 points
HN discussionRelated classic: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html
Comment linking /bliki/MonolithFirst.html
on “Don't start with microservices – monoliths are your friend”Submitted Serverless Architectures as a story · 426 points
HN discussionA lot of the big agile companies are using event sourcing. So there isn't even a model to delete. It's all events with the models being created from a snapshot of events. The event stream is usually durable and lives forever. https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html So with this type of system nothing is ever "deleted". It's just an event that something is deleted. This is a common and very scalable system…
Comment linking /eaaDev/EventSourcing.html
on “Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted”Submitted Some thoughts on LLMs and software development as a story · 420 points
HN discussionBecause like any design pattern microservices should be used to address a specific problem. Martin Fowler describes that particular design pattern here in great detail: https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html Microservices however unfortunately have become a fashionable cure-all that's applied indiscriminately to software projects of all sizes, ages and purposes. Hardly anyone seems to be asking anymore…
Comment linking /bliki/MonolithFirst.html
on “Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads”Submitted The role of developer skills in agentic coding as a story · 336 points
HN discussionYep. I call this resume oriented development, which I think is in the Gotime podcast he links at the bottom here. Martin Fowler wrote a good article about the same thing https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html tl;dr: If you don't understand the problem domain, build a monolith following sensible engineering principles to get going ASAP and then split it out when you understand where the functional line…
Comment linking /bliki/MonolithFirst.html
on “Monoliths Are the Future”Submitted Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost? as a story · 324 points
HN discussionWould this be an example of a bug that could have been detected with contract-style testing? https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ContractTest.html
Comment linking /bliki/ContractTest.html
on “NULL license plate not such a bright idea”Submitted ThoughtWorks has been sold to private equity as a story · 319 points
HN discussion
