Architect's Reference

Lookup tables for the decisions you make more than once. Articles are written once; these are revised whenever the underlying numbers move — every page carries the date it was last verified. The calculators live next door, in architecture tools.

Architecture Glossary63 terms, each with a worked example and the mistake it usually causes.Browse A–Z →Architecture Tools3 browser-based calculators and generators — SLO budgets, capacity envelopes, decision records. Free, no sign-up.Open tools →

Performance & Latency

Reference

Latency Numbers Every Engineer Should Know — 2026

The orders of magnitude that decide your architecture, re-measured for NVMe, DDR5, 25GbE and LLM inference.

ReviewedAug 27, 2026·9 min

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Distributed Systems

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The Distributed Systems Failure Catalog

Fourteen ways distributed systems fail — trigger, telemetry signature, mitigation, and the fix that makes it worse.

ReviewedAug 28, 2026·16 min

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Consistency Models Reference

Linearizability to eventual, serializable to read committed, CAP to PACELC — and what each real database actually gives you by default.

ReviewedAug 28, 2026·12 min

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Quality Attributes

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Architecture Fitness Functions Catalog

Sixty automated checks that turn architectural intentions into a build that fails — coupling, latency, resilience, security, cost, and LLM evals.

ReviewedAug 28, 2026·14 min

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Data Stores

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Data Store Selection Matrix

Thirteen storage categories, what each is genuinely good at, where PostgreSQL is still enough — and what a second store actually costs you.

ReviewedAug 28, 2026·13 min

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Agent Engineering

Reference

Agent Architecture Patterns

Eight patterns from a single call to multi-agent, with the escalation order, the controls each one needs, and the failure mode each one has.

ReviewedAug 28, 2026·15 min

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