Nothing Shared, Everything Gained: The Origin Story

Ten years ago I started writing a book about software architecture.

Then life happened. I co-founded a company, scaled it to seventy engineers, survived multiple pivots, got acquired, and burned out. The manuscript sat untouched for years.

At the end of 2024 I left the start-up world and picked the book back up, expecting a decade-old manuscript to be obsolete. It wasn't. The years in between had proved the ideas worked.

The patterns I'd started writing about at Qafoo — from seven years of consulting with over a hundred development teams — held up through eight years of product development at Frontastic. No rewrites. No moments where technical debt blocked product decisions. Same architecture, from five engineers to seventy.

The book is called "Nothing Shared, Everything Gained." It's about building web applications with minimal side effects, strict dependency direction, and code that stays changeable. The examples are PHP, but the principles aren't.

It's available now at codethatships.com — pay what you want, starting at €0. I'd rather you read it and apply the patterns than skip it because of price.

Ten years. A hundred teams. One book.