Resources
Vertical Slice Architecture — Article Series
A deep-dive series on moving from layered architecture to Vertical Slices, written by the creator of MediatorK:
- Part 1 — From the Layered Architecture Trap to Vertical Slices
- Part 2 — From the Layered Architecture Trap to Vertical Slices
- Part 3 — From the Layered Architecture Trap to Vertical Slices
- Part 4 — From the Layered Architecture Trap to Vertical Slices
- Part 5 — From the Layered Architecture Trap to Vertical Slices
- Depend on Abstractions, Not Concretions
Video
Jimmy Bogard — Vertical Slice Architecture
The talk that inspired MediatorK — Jimmy Bogard explains why Vertical Slices are a better default than layered architecture.
MediatR (.NET)
MediatorK is inspired by MediatR — the most widely-used mediator library in the .NET ecosystem, by Jimmy Bogard.
Testing
Never mock in unit tests.
Unit tests should only verify pure functions. If your code is hard to test without mocking, that's a signal — extract the pure logic and test that directly. Everything else belongs in integration or end-to-end tests.
The testing pyramid puts unit tests at ~70% of your test suite for a reason: they're fast, stable, and reliable. Mocking undermines all of that — it couples your tests to implementation details, makes refactoring painful, and gives you false confidence. Mock libraries make this worse by making mocking feel easy.
- Mocking is a Code Smell — Eric Elliott