Designing Human-Targeted Random IDs

Article also published on DZone.

ℹ️ NOTE We don't deal here with technical ID used as primary keys in relational databases. See my previous article here if you seek a great way to generate them.

Context

During one of my recent projects, I have been asked to design a scheme of IDs highly usable by humans. The business requirement was mainly to create pseudo-random values that can't be inferred or guessed in order to be used as a secret token printed on some official documents for future controls.

Later on, we had a similar requirement with lower security concerns: generating...

(This article has been also published at DZone)

How to Do UUID as Primary Keys the Right Way

TL;DR: UUID V4 or its COMB variant are great to mitigate various security, stability, and architectural issues, but be aware of various pitfalls when using them.

Why Do We Need Technical IDs in the First Place?

Any properly designed relational database table owns a Primary Key (PK) allowing you to uniquely and stably identify each record. Even if the primary key can be composite (built of several columns), it is a widespread good practice to dedicate a special column (often named id or...

(This article has been also published at DZone)

In most organizations, developers are not allowed to access the production environment for stability, security, or regulatory reasons. This is a quite good practice (enforced by many frameworks like COBIT or ITIL) to restrict access to production but a major drawback is a mental distance created between developers and the real world. Likewise, the monitoring is usually only managed by operators and very little feedback is provided to developers except when they have to fix application bugs (ASAP, of course). As a matter of fact, most developers have...

Four years after the first release of a template in French, we release a revisited English version.

This architecture template is applicable to most management IT projects, regardless of the general architecture chosen (monolithic, SOA, micro-service, n-tier, …​). It has already been used on several important projects including large organizations. It is maintained on a regular basis.

Discover it at GitHub.

(This article has also been published at DZone)

TL;DR

In Java, do:

String normalizedString = Normalizer.normalize(originalString,Normalizer.Form.NFKD)
.replaceAll("[^\\p{ASCII}]", "").toLowerCase().replaceAll("\\s{2,}", " ").trim();

Nowadays, most strings are Unicode-encoded and we are able to work with many different native characters with diacritical signs/accents (like ö, é, À) or ligatures (like æ or ʥ). Characters can be stored in UTF-8 (for instance) and associated glyphs can be displayed properly if the font supports them. This is good news for cultural specificities respect.

However, we often observe recurring difficulties when comparing strings issued from different information systems and/or initially typed by humans.

Human brain is a machine...

Reasons to change

This personal home page and blog was previously self-hosted using a great Open Source Wiki engine: Dokuwiki. It worked great for long years but few months ago, I felt than it was time to change lanes and embrace the JAM Stack (JavaScript / API & Markdown).

Issues with traditional wikis

• Security: many spam in comments, possible PHP vulnerabilities
• Regular upgrades to be performed against the engine
• Many plugins required to make something useful. Old ones, conflicting ones...
• Not so easy to customize the rendered pages
• Slower than a static website
• Much larger electricity consumption to serve pages
• Requires PHP modules to be installed and tunned...

Registre des décisions d'architecture

Un registre de décisions d'architecture sert à consigner les décisions importantes d'architecture (les ADR, Architecture Decision Record).

Le but est de permettre la connaissance et la compréhension des choix a posteriori et de partager les décisions. Le dossier d'architecture quant à lui ne reprend pas ces choix mais ne fait apparaître que la décision finale.

Il n'y a qu'un seul registre d'ADR par projet.

Format d'un ADR

Chaque ADR est constitué d'un fichier unique au format asciidoc avec ce nom : [séquence XYZ démarrant à 001]-[decision].adoc.

Format de la décision : en minuscule sans espaces avec des tirets comme séparateur. Exemple : 007-API-devant-bases-existantes-perennes.adoc.

Chaque ADR contient idéalement le contenu...

Voir https://github.com/bflorat/modele-da

Le modèle a été augmenté, simplifié et corrigé. Surtout, il prend la voie d'une documentation vivante en étant repris en asciidoc (il sera donc maintenant possible de proposer des merge requests par exemple). Les diagrammes sont toujours en Plantuml mais la plupart ont été repris en diagrammes C4.

Retours et PR appréciés