|
✂️Cut your QA cycles down to minutes with QA Wolf (Sponsored)
 |
If QA is a bottleneck on your software engineering team and you’re releasing slowly because of it, you need to check out QA Wolf.
Their fully-managed service gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and their AI-native platform helps dev teams ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.
QA Wolf takes testing off your plate. They can get you:
Unlimited parallel test runs
24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation
Human-verified bug reports sent directly to your team
Zero flakes guarantee
The benefit? No more manual E2E testing. No more slow QA cycles. No more bugs reaching production.
With QA Wolf, Drata’s team of 80+ engineers achieved 4x more test cases and 86% faster QA cycles.
This week’s system design refresher:
24 Good Resources to Learn Software Architecture in 2025
SOAP vs REST vs GraphQL vs RPC
SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge vs Kinesis
Top 5 common ways to improve API performance
xAI’s Grok-3 One-Pager
SPONSOR US
24 Good Resources to Learn Software Architecture in 2025
 |
The resources can be divided into different types such as:
Software Design Books
Some books that can help are DDIA, System Design Volume 1 & 2, Clean Architecture, Domain-Driven Design, and Software Architecture: the Hard PartsTech Blogs and Newsletters
Read technical blogs by companies like Netflix, Uber, Meta, and Airbnb. Also, the ByteByteGo newsletter provides insights into software design every week.YouTube Channels and Architectural Resources
YouTube channels like MIT Distributed Systems, Goto Conferences, and ByteByteGo can help with software architecture and system design. Azure Architecture Center and AWS Architecture Blog are other important resources.WhitePapers
For deeper insights, read whitepapers like Facebook Memcache Scaling, Cassandra, Amazon DynamoDB, Kafka, and Google File System.Software Career Books
A Software Architect also needs to develop holistic skills. Books about software career aspects such as Pragmatic Programmer, The Software Architect Elevator, The Software Engineer's Guidebook, and Philosophy of Software Design can help.
Over to you: Which other resources will you add to the list?
SOAP vs REST vs GraphQL vs RPC
The diagram below illustrates the API timeline and API styles comparison.
 |
Over time, different API architectural styles are released. Each of them has its own patterns of standardizing data exchange.
You can check out the use cases of each style in the diagram.
SQS vs SNS vs EventBridge vs Kinesis
 |
AWS SQS: It is a fully managed message queuing service that helps decouple communication between distributed components.
AWS SNS: A fully managed publish/subscribe messaging service using topics to send messages to multiple subscribers or endpoints (such as email, Lambda, SQS, and so on).
AWS EventBridge: It is a serverless event bus that facilitates the routing of events between AWS services, and applications based on specific routing rules and filters.
AWS Kinesis Data Streams: A real-time data streaming service that captures, processes, and analyzes data in near real-time.
How can you choose which service to use?
Here are some basic tips and examples:
For massive amounts of events like a clickstream from an application use Kinesis Data Stream
For events processed by a single consumer like an image processing job, SQS is a better choice.
For sending messages and notifications, SNS is a great choice.
For system events such as a new user registration that multiple services must receive and react to, use EventBridge.
Over to you: Have you used SQS, SNS, EventBridge, or Kinesis?