Who wrote this, and why

Nikolaos Fragos is a software engineer with more than a decade of experience building software systems: public-sector platforms used by ministries and schools, debt collection, betting platforms, and payment integrations, where he implemented the saga pattern he writes about in this book. He holds a degree in electronic and computer engineering from the Technical University of Crete and a master's in network-oriented information systems from the University of Piraeus, and he is a certified Professional Scrum Master — a fact that matters mostly because of what Part IV does with it.

He describes himself as a retro enthusiast, and still remembers the last corners of Need for Speed III.

Why the book exists

Because of a project called Ariadne, and one day inside it spent producing nothing at all. It was the most expensive failure I ever stood inside, and it taught me — slowly, and at full price — the single most important thing I know about this profession: software is a human problem wearing a technical costume.

The book is the thread I wish someone had handed me at the entrance. Not a methodology, not a framework you adopt wholesale and defend like a religion. A thread: a set of hard-won principles you can hold onto when the build is red, the deadline is unrealistic, the requirements are incomplete, and everyone is looking around the room waiting for someone else to decide.

None of it is theory. All of it cost me something to learn. I hope it costs you less.

Why this site exists

Three reasons, and none of them is marketing. Some material genuinely should not be printed, because it goes stale and a book cannot be corrected — that is field notes. Some material was always a hypertext object printed flat — that is the lexicon. And the honest counterarguments, collected in one place, are the fastest way for a stranger to decide whether this book is for them, so they are here, free, before anything is asked of you.

There is no newsletter, no pop-up, and nothing on this site is behind an email address.

What this site counts

Page views, and only in aggregate. Cloudflare, which serves this site, adds one small script as each page leaves its network; it reports that a page was loaded, and which one, back to this domain. It sets no cookie, keeps no identifier and does not follow you anywhere else — open the network tab and you will find this site's own HTML, its stylesheet, three fonts and that one script. I can see that a chapter was read a hundred times this week. I cannot see that you read it.

This is not principle for its own sake. A book that argues software is a human problem should not treat its readers as telemetry. A count of pages is the whole of what is measured, because anything more was never worth the request it cost.