Engineering Guidelines Site

I’ve put together a reference site for engineering best practices, available at guidelines.ryanharrison.co.uk. The goal is a single place to find guidelines and conventions covering the full stack - from core principles through to deployment.

Rather than being prescriptive about specific tools, most sections aim to explain the reasoning behind a recommendation so you can apply it to your own context.

What’s Covered

Principles and practices - Core engineering principles covers the fundamentals: SOLID, DRY, KISS, YAGNI, clean code, and when to apply them. There’s also a code review guide and sections on technical debt, pull requests, and git workflow.

Architecture - Patterns for microservices, event-driven systems, and multi-tenancy.

API design - REST fundamentals and patterns, GraphQL, and OpenAPI contract-first development.

Testing - The testing strategy page covers the overall approach. From there, individual pages go into unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, mutation, and chaos testing.

Security and observability - Security overview covering authentication, authorisation, input validation, and data protection. Observability covers structured logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.

Languages and frameworks - Guidelines for Java, Kotlin, TypeScript, and Swift, with framework-specific sections for Spring Boot, React, Angular, React Native, Android, and iOS.

Infrastructure - Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and a fairly detailed AWS section covering compute, networking, storage, EKS, and more.