Design Best Practices

Other best practices

Design Patterns

Learn these, study these, love these.

Mind Your Complexity

Programming complexity can be reduced if you follow these rules of thumbs:

Complex:

foo --calls--> bar --calls--> baz

Simple:

foo --calls--> bar
foo --calls--> baz

Payload Format

Comparison of data serialization formats.

On the wire use any one of:

• JSON;
• BSON;
• Protocol Buffers.

Do not use XML.

Configuration Storage

The way we store configuration is subject to fashion and is heavily influenced by the operating environment and/or cloud provider. Here are some reasonable candidates:

• .ini and .toml
• .yaml

JSON is barely suitable - use YAML instead.

Secrets - Storage and Passing

Secrets should not be hitting the disk or passed on the command line. You CAN pass secrets via environment variables. Better yet stdin or a cloud provider’s API.

Store these in the cloud. Candidates:

• vault;
• github repo secrets can be used in github actions.