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**Software design is the last craft in the building.** Chips, languages, protocols, deployment: each got standardized in turn, while the shape of the code was left to taste, so the same business problem yields a different structure in every shop and every sprint. *Process-First Design* is about the part that never got standardized, and the quiet evidence that it is standardizing anyway.

The thesis is one sentence: **the unit of design is the process, not the entity.** What the software does, not what it is. You design a thing that happens, a trigger producing an outcome, and you shape the data around the processes that use it rather than around a domain model built before any use. The subtitle, *less art, more engineering*, is meant literally: a method removes the judgment that never should have been judgment, the dozen small structural decisions that have a right shape and were re-litigated every time, and leaves the judgment genuinely worth a human, the architecture and the domain and the hard trade-offs.

The book does not argue the industry should adopt this; it observes that the industry already is. Practitioners in different languages and communities, among them Scott Wlaschin, Debasish Ghosh, Jimmy Bogard, Sandro Mancuso, and Rico Fritzsche, keep arriving at the same structural move independently. This book names it and gives it a vocabulary.

It is structured as a spiral. One running example, a ticketing platform, starts as one customer buying one seat and grows pass by pass into a multi-venue, multi-tenant system. The same domain is carried up through four altitudes, use case to workflow to subsystem to system, so the methodology is tested on the same material at increasing magnification rather than on a fresh toy each chapter. A closing pass turns it loose on a second, inherited domain to show it travels.

The methodology is language-neutral, holding in Scala, Kotlin, Rust, C#, and TypeScript as readily as in Java; the code is shown in Java through the companion *Java Backend Coding Technology*. It is built to be read in one sitting, and it is scoped to enterprise backend software, systems large and long-lived enough for structural coupling to become the dominant cost.

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Kick off your book project, get started with GhostAI, get better at marketing, or spend the day doing all three! Free live workshops on Zoom. Saturday, June 27, 2026.

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