This is a follow on from a previous post on microfront-ends and federated GraphQL which you can find here: Decoupling digital with micro-frontends and micro-services For the last couple of years we have been working with mono-repos and kubernetes. We strived to have a reproducible, fast build system that could deploy to kubernetes locally or cloud, whilst giving a great developer experience. The…
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About Me
I'm a highly experienced technology leader with in-depth software development and architectural knowledge. I have spent the last two decades developing and delivering enterprise, web, desktop, mobile and serverless applications. I have worked across multiple industries including simulation, military, academic, games, finance and public sectors. I'm currently leading multiple cross-functional teams at Nationwide Building Society. My recent work has involved architecting a large scale enterprise Azure web estate running GraphQL and dotnet core microservices.
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The large organisation problem Large organisations, be they modern tech giants or established enterprises, face tough challenges when it comes to ownership of digital assets. As organisations grow and shrink, technology trends shift from monoliths to microservices, shared platforms to value streams, the brunt of the pain is felt by the teams maintaining those assets. We are all too aware of the…
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At Nationwide we've created an awesome Enterprise Jamstack platform. Before I go in to how we've built it and what it looks like lets break down what I mean by those two words "Enterprise" and"Jamstack". Enterprise Which in this case means "Enterprise CMS". We're talking about Content Management Systems and DXPs. I didn't get enterprise CMS systems for a long time. I couldn’t see the value: they…
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Scenario You decide to register a domain in your own name to create a blog, which is an odd feeling, and perhaps on the wrong end of the narcissism spectrum. But what do you do next? Wordpress would be the go-to of old, but it is not even remotely exciting tech to tinker with. I would like to say I agonised over which tech stack I would build this blog with, but I didn't. It was a straight…
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Sitecore JSS @ Scale 2. Building for multi-site with decoupled front-ends and a microservice architecture Scenario My team found ourselves in an uncomfortable situation — our organisations tech strategy pointed towards container platforms and microservice architectures, yet much of the estate we were responsible for was powered by a traditional virtual machine based, monolithic architecture. When…
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Sitecore JSS @ Scale 3. DevOps — IaC & ephemeral environments Intro The advent of Sitecore JSS & it’s headless server-side rendering of node applications opens up a whole new world of cloud infrastructure and DevOps tools. The first thing any React developer will be thinking is which flavour of Kubernetes am I deploying my application too? That is a big shift from Azure App Service — the current…
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Sitecore JSS @ Scale The transition to headless Whilst digital transformation journeys are always challenging, with the right mix of people, technology and some lucky timing they can also be a lot of fun. In late 2018, Nationwide Building Society set about transforming our web estate using Sitecore JSS. We’ve learned a lot on the way, not only about technology, but also team transformation. This…
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Serverless CQRS in Azure Part 1: Introduction, Commands & Event sourcing This is a multi-part article. In the coming weeks I’ll be publishing more articles to cover Projection Processing, Querying Materialized Views and a comparison with an Azure Functions approach. Introduction Keen to explore the realms of what is possible with Azure’s Serverless technologies, I decided there was no better way…
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