Riomhaire Research

The Business Link between Strategy, OKR, and DORA

The Business Link between Strategy, OKR, and DORA The core link between corporate strategy, OKRs, and DORA is a vertical alignment chain: strategy sets the destination, OKRs translate that destination into measurable quarterly intent, and DORA provides the engineering-level signal that tells you whether execution is actually tracking toward that intent. Without this chain, each layer operates in isolation — strategy stays on slides, OKRs become performance theatre, and DORA metrics are engineering navel-gazing.

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Deming's Perspective on Fad-Following in Software Architecture

Deming’s Perspective on Fad-Following in Software Architecture William Edwards Deming, known as the “father of the quality movement,” was influential in rebuilding Japan after WWII. He revolutionised Japanese industry with his management theories, criticising trend-following as poor, fear-driven, short-term management lacking a scientific basis. Over my career, I have seen many companies and development teams being “fad-driven” at many different levels: Deployment: For many products, Initially In-house deployed, then AWS deployed, then Mesos, and finally Kubernetes.

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Saturday, August 16, 2025

Feature Slice Architecture and Use Case Design Patterns

There is an alternate to laying out your projects in a horizontal fashion, and that is vertical or feature layout

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Thursday, July 24, 2025

Similarities and differences between Fast-CGI, CGI, and Amazon AWS Lambdas

Similarities and differences between Fast-CGI, CGI, and Amazon AWS Lambdas I’m not sure what triggered the thought, but it might have been my reflection on the “old days” of web development and its evolution. This led me to consider the similarities between CGI, FastCGI and AWS Lambda. Agreed, they represent different paradigms for handling dynamic web requests, and AWS has a core need to monetise the functionality, but the technologies share many fundamental concepts:

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Monday, July 14, 2025

My Project Guideline Tenets

My Project Guideline Tenets These tenets are collected from a variety of sources and experiences over the years, they serve as the foundation for my design decisions and project goals. They reflect the mindset and values I believe are essential for building innovative, effective, and meaningful solutions. TECHNICALLY FEARLESS Strive to challenge the status quo by solving complex problems with unconventional approaches, inspiring others to dream big and achieve greatness.

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Thursday, May 1, 2025

FURPS TAR and Software Design Questions

This post summarized what the acronyms 'FURPS' and 'TAR' are and what the mean for software and system design.

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Saturday, June 3, 2023

Software Prioritization

What is the next story/task/epic to do? How many of you face this on a daily basis? come on, let's be honest — most of us. Tools such as Jira ‘help’ this somewhat with their ‘priority’ and ‘severity’ fields, but developers often find it a struggle to prioritize stories based on those two fields alone. This short article hopefully details an approach that is more understandable to developers and other stakeholders.

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Tuesday, September 14, 2021

What's wrong with REST

The Representational State Transfer architecture (REST Reference-1) is a common approach to the API design of micro-services(Reference-2). REST does have some issues which have led to alternative architectures being developed to solve them. The popular GraphQL framework is one of them(Reference-3,7). This article will not go through all the pros of REST versus GraphQL or other alternatives to REST. Others have produced many good answers on the matter - just Google it.

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Monday, April 5, 2021

Adaptive Microservices

“She can’nae take anymore, Captain!!” shouts Scotty as he enters my office. “The system is overloaded because of the number of new customers sales have managed to make this quarter” - “I know” I reply, “Datadog just alerted me via pager-duty - but there is little we can do at the moment, were scaled out to the limit we are allowed and we will have to ask management for more resources”.

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Thursday, December 10, 2020

How to compare contract and job offers

How do you compare contracts and what factors should you take into account? This blog post hopefully helps you do that.

Posted by Riomhaire Research on Sunday, July 14, 2019

Software Designers, Open Source Enthusiasts and Poets