Toshikiso means urban platform in Japanese. We originally envisioned Toshikiso as a platform solution for Black urban communities in both America and the UK. However, Black Americans started acting funny and flaky following clowns and clout-chasers, so we focused on building our API ecosystem to be a global-based urban solution.

Our platform will use industry-standard patterns and practices used by solution developers around the world. We spent a few years building out low-code platforms to help those who are not solution developers to create solutions driven by the Toshikiso platform.

I want to explain two things why I’m writing this article for you all. First, I look at all these cornball goofy Black tech people out there who keep claiming they are handling theirs. I can instantly tell their code is not polished. They have no real path to improve their code without an expensive re-write and know they are not going anywhere other than a Black Enterprise generic write-up or a link on a cornball Blavity Afrotech Facebook link share, that’s it.

Second, the majority of you are going to face a harsh economic reality in 2021. You should have every expectation that 2021 is going to be worst than the initial shock of 2020. I experienced the 2001 and 2008 fallout and I know the script – Black folks were special and extra beforehand living off other people gains, the economy falls through, and Black folks get tossed out first and cannot land on their feet then Black life get downgraded. It is beggar belief after Black people went through two economic devastations, we still got these fancy-ass Black folks acting like they special as we head towards another repeat of 2001 and 2008.

You don’t want any of that 2001 and 2008; it will quickly turn a $150k/year bougie person in Atlanta to a $0/year couch-surfing good-for-nothing bum at their auntie house in New Jersey. You want to be highly-skilled with options to build your own or stay employable with the desired talent. Not only that, the world is changing through digital transformation. Toshikiso is very disruptive and powerful -  that’s why we move in silence because we know what we will wipe out and take over efficiently through digitalization.

This article will share our patterns and practices to learn and understand how the future of jobs and the world is going. There are also many free online courses and videos on most of the topics discussed here so, and please take time to learn how moves are made in this tech game.

Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement originated in Japan as Kaizen, which was presented first in America as process improvement but ignored by industrialists – Japan took it and ran with it. Many mindsets in America like to see people and things fail so they can point fingers and judge. Continuous Improvement instead focuses on the belief that you focus on a mindset and ecosystem that you commit to a lifecycle of continuous improvement and integration.

Agile and Scrum are continuous integration and improvement processes where users create stories, and those stories are deployed in successive phases into a big vision or epic. But there needs to be an actual system in place that can facilitate continuous integration or improvement. That system is called source control and build automation and release automation. This system is what many Black tech startup founders are missing and why they so sloppy and amateur.

We build code, deploy code, test code multiple times a day, and push out new releases at least once a week.  Almost every tech shop and operation may do this a hundred times a day. We use Github, Jenkins, Kubernetes, and Docker to help us create new features and quickly release them. While people are talking around us, we continually improve and release new features and fixes while they run their mouths.

Continuous improvement is a system we will help Black entreprenuers implement. As I said, Black folks are smiling all in a Black Enterprise photoshoot while their competitors are releasing dozens of new features and improvements every day. I recommend you learn systems like Jenkins and Github or Gitlab and learn how to perform automated testing and release of your systems because it will make you or break you. There are plenty of jobs in demand for these skills paying way into the six-figure range as well.

CQRS Pattern and Event Sourcing

You are looking at how Toshikiso works and how modern web/mobile applications work in 2020 or 2021. CQRS is command query responsibility segregation. This system separates the writes from the read instead of insert/update/select statements on the same database that was the former practice of software development.

Let me explain how CQRS works because, in reality, this is how you create solutions in days while others take months. The write command you see in the diagram – we write to the database and don’t care how the database structure will look or designed because we are just writing. What we do is create a materialized view or a simple view that combined all of the write tables to be usable for an application.

So if you create a new virtual shop on The Merchant and the Flow (web platform in the diagram), we will write to a generic Merchant table. When displayed, we combine the merchant information, the settings, and the address information as a single view based on the screen within Merchant and the Flow. This allows us to create web systems and mobile apps quickly.

Event sourcing is what you should be happy about. With event sourcing, you publish an event and pass data to a single write table. For example, you post an event such as “QR Payment Initiated” and provide information such as your merchant address, customer address, payment amount, and order basket. What we do is source the event table and execute against the event. So for a QR payment, we have a listener that looks for QR events and processes payment. Another service looks for a QR event and generates a receipt by checking if the process payment has been successful. Then another service looks for the same QR event and sends a follow-up email for a coupon.

What makes event sourcing excellent is that we don’t code like if the order process is successful then print receipt because sequential code tends to fail if one step was coded wrong and takes a long time to detect and fix. We can separate the tasks to respond to events as microservice with event sourcing – the next technology we will discuss.

Microservices

Microservices are independent modules that perform a service. For example, in Toshikiso, we have an Account Ledger microservice you can debit and credit, and that’s all its sole responsibility. Then we have a Membership microservice that add and verify membership. So, for example, if you create a laundromat with a membership model, you will call membership to verify the user, and if they want to use a laundry, they can scan a QR code that will debit an amount from their Account ledger.

In the diagram, you see a mobile app or web site that calls a gateway but likely don’t realize they call a gateway. The API gateway route the message to the proper microservice and pass the information back to the mobile app or website.

Note each microservice has its own database and does not share databases with other microservices. The reason why is the microservice owns the entire domain, such as membership information or account information. Your tech job in the future is likely going to be this model where you and a team may be responsible for one or more microservice.

Understanding microservice is very important for another paradigm shift – the semi-autonomous business operation. The microservice architecture allows us to create virtual businesses by creating inventory, accounting, reservation, order microservices to run entire companies.  That’s what the big companies are doing, and you better learn this microservice architecture.

Sagas

A saga manages multiple steps to complete a task, which relates to event sourcing and microservices. For example, let’s say a person enters a store. The smart camera recognizes the activity and creates an event, “person enter store” – this event is designated a saga, and a session made with the list of tasks.

So one task can be a customer verbally greet the customer. Another task is to use facial recognition to identify the customer and map to their Kossier address. If the customer is recognized, then a task to send a message to the user a coupon while they are there as an incentive. Please note that new tasks can be added to a saga later in the future.

Our upcoming platform, Stony|Ellis, allows you to create sagas and map tasks. Microsoft Azure has a feature called Event Hubs and this is how “serverless applications” are made. You provide the tasks to complete, and when it happens, tasks are triggered to run and give you a status of what happened for each task.

Suppose you are a white-collar worker feeling threatened by automation. In that case, you can learn Microsoft Office 365 and work with serverless applications to create your automated solutions faster and better than the IT department. You can develop sagas where an event happens like a status change; you can create sagas that process the event change and use Power BI, which is part of Office 365 to create a dashboard to show real-time generated metrics.

Getting Up to Speed

This article presented the latest and greatest technology patterns and practices most people in the IT field are not up to speed with.  I hope you study these patterns more and learn how to incorporate them into your venture startup or stay gainfully employed in 2021. Because it is a lot easier for you to create real solutions nowadays, and you don’t have to code as much because of platforms like Toshikiso and our ability to scale fast due to our design patterns.

Our expertise is why we can move in silence and move in power on these weak clowns trying to show off. People should already know our global scale, and we make moves around the world – these cornballs don’t have our revenue scale. Based on what we wrote, we should know that we can eliminate and obsolete any Black tech business model acting like they better than us because we can continuously improve and scale-out microservices faster than them with our platform.

Toshikiso has a lot of power, and using these technology patterns should open your eyes to the possibilities of tech entrepreneurship. We can publish an event a song played on a streaming station, and microservices can pay revenue. A private club can have microservices to manage the drink menu, manage membership, manage music stream playback, and reservations.

So 2021 will be a transformative year - you can be the one disrupted, or you can be part of the disruptors that create those new paradigms – the choice is yours.