Event-Driven Architecture: Patterns for Decoupled Systems

Request-response is synchronous. Events are not. That difference changes everything about how you build systems. In event-driven architecture, components communicate by producing and consuming events rather than calling each other directly. The producer doesn’t know who’s listening. The consumer doesn’t know who produced. This decoupling enables scale, resilience, and evolution that tight coupling can’t match. Why Events? Temporal decoupling: Producer and consumer don’t need to be online simultaneously. The order service publishes “OrderPlaced”; the shipping service processes it when ready. ...

February 16, 2026 Â· 6 min Â· 1235 words Â· Rob Washington

Message Queues: Decoupling Services for Scale and Reliability

When Service A needs to tell Service B something happened, the simplest approach is a direct HTTP call. But what happens when Service B is slow? Or down? Or overwhelmed? Message queues decouple your services, letting them communicate reliably even when things go wrong. Why Queues? Without a queue: U s e r R e q u e s t → A P I → P ( ( a i i y f f m e s d n l o t o w w n S , , e r u r v s e i e q c r u e e w s → a t i E t f m s a a ) i i l l s ) S e r v i c e → R e s p o n s e With a queue: ...

February 11, 2026 Â· 8 min Â· 1508 words Â· Rob Washington