#42 Architect With Confidence: Key Learning Resources of 2024

From groundbreaking books and conference talks to practical articles - 2024 brought a lot of excellent materials around software architecture. I share the resources that resonated most with me.

Last December, my software architecture resources roundup on LinkedIn gained significant traction. The post shared top books, articles, and repositories for architects.

This year, I am moving the annual list to my newsletter, focusing exclusively on 2024's outstanding books, talks, and other resources. It has been a remarkable year for architectural knowledge, with excellent publications and insights worth sharing.

I will focus mainly on software architecture, but also on related topics. Let's start with books.

Books

Writing "Master Software Architecture" dominated my 2024, which meant less technical reading than usual. The book's demanding creation process consumed most of my energy and focus until August. Once I finished the manuscript, I dove back into reading and discovered several exceptional titles published this year (in random order):

1. Platform Strategy by Gregor Hohpe

2. Architecture Modernization by Nick Tune

3. Understanding Eventsourcing by Martin Dilger

4. Balancing Coupling in Software Design by Vladik Khononov

5. The Accidental CIO by Scott Millett

Talks

Next, I would like to share my curated selection of the most impactful architecture talks from 2024. I have arranged these without any particular ranking to focus on their individual merits:

1. So You Want to Build An Event Driven System? by James Eastham

2. An Introduction to Residuality Theory by Barry O’Reilly

3. Let's build the worst Event Sourcing system! by Oskar Dudycz

4. Architects Aren’t the Smartest People in the Room by Gregor Hohpe

5. Design more decoupled services with one weird trick by Udi Dahan

Articles

These articles and blog posts hit home for me in 2024:

1. Deduplication in Distributed Systems: Myths, Realities, and Practical Solutions by Oskar Dudycz

2. Clean Architecture: The Missing Chapter by Milan Jovanović

3. The biggest-ever global outage: lessons for software engineers by Gergely Orosz

4. The Documentation Tradeoff by Kent Beck

5. 3 Surprising lessons you can adopt from Extreme Programming by Denis Čahuk

Additionally, I invite you to read one article from my newsletter which was the most popular one in 2024. It shows you how to frame technical decisions in business language that resonates with stakeholders:

Repos

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any interesting repo in 2024 that would show you some architectural concerns and explain them with real-world examples. However, two existing repos remain invaluable for anyone serious about domain-driven design and system modularization:

1. Modular Monolith with DDD (.NET 8) by Kamil Grzybek

2. Evolutionary Architecture by Example (.NET 9) by Kamil Bączek and Maciej Jedrzejewski

Summary

Looking back at 2024, I can't help but feel optimistic about where software architecture is heading. More teams are embracing fundamentals, and thoughtfully considering system coupling - changes I witness daily in my consulting work. The resources I have shared capture this momentum perfectly. I can't wait to hear which ones resonated with you and what you will build next.

Keep building amazing things, and see you next year with more architectural adventures!