Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 2. Building Products

A taxonomy of microservice integration techniques [INFSOF Journal]

Abstract Context Microservices have become an important architectural style for building robust and scalable software systems. A system’s functionality is split into independent units, the microservices, that communicate over a network and can be deployed independently. The shift of complexity into the integration layer necessitates enhanced collaboration among stakeholders, stressing the importance of effective communication.…

2025-04-04
A systematic review of common beginner programming mistakes in data engineering [CSEE&T 2025]

Abstract The design of effective programming languages, libraries, frameworks, tools, and platforms for data engineering strongly depends on their ease and correctness of use. Anyone who ignores that it is humans who use these tools risks building tools that are useless, or worse, harmful. To ensure our data engineering tools are based on solid foundations,…

2025-02-15
Open-source software: The ultimate in reuse or a risk not worth taking? (Mead et al., IEEE Computer)

I’m happy to report that the 33rd article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. As always, please consider writing an article proposal! Title Open-source software: The ultimate in reuse or a risk not worth taking? Keywords None Authors Nancy R. Mead, Carol Woody, Scott Hissam Publication Computer vol. 58, no.…

2025-02-02
“Two hard things in computer science” explained

You may have heard the saying “There are only two hard things in computer science: Cache invalidation and naming things.” The web and Martin Fowler attribute this saying to one Phil Karlton; I actually thought it was Leslie Lamport, but maybe I’m confusing it with this saying “A distributed system is one in which the…

2025-01-27
Open source program offices [Computer Magazine]

I’m happy to report that the 32th article in the open source column of IEEE Computer has been published. As always, please consider writing an article proposal! Title Open Source Program Offices Keywords Open source governance, open source license compliance, open source program office, OSPO Authors Dirk Riehle Publication Computer vol. 57, no. 12 (December…

2024-12-12
Is isEven() a bad function to have?

Someone on Twitter got all exasperated that there is an isEven() function in Javascript to compute whether a number is an even number. After all it is equivalent to the simple expression of ((n % 2) == 0); why would they not use this? Well, already this simple example contains most of what you need…

2024-01-19