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Content Creation

Twenty years of hands-on architecture work, distilled into newsletters, podcasts and video that reach 110,000+ engineers, architects and tech leaders. Built on trust, not targeting.

The philosophy

"The best marketing doesn't feel like marketing."

Tom Fishburne

Most developer content is noise. This isn't.

What I produce isn't built around a publishing calendar or a monetisation strategy. It's built around the same questions I've been working on for twenty years, how systems fail, how teams break, how architecture decisions compound over time.

That's why the audience trusts it. And that's what changes the equation for partners.

The reach
110k+
Active community across LinkedIn, newsletters and video
20k+
Combined subscribers across Dear Architects, Token by Token, and Building Micro-Frontends
350+
Conference keynotes and sessions across 4 continents
20+ yrs
Building and shipping production architecture at scale
What we do

Three ways to work
together

From a single sponsored issue to a retained architecture advisory, built around what you're actually trying to achieve.

01

Education

Webinars, in-person workshops, and multi-week online cohorts for software architects and senior engineers.

Individual practitioners: The InfoQ/QCon Certified Architect Program is the flagship public programme, structured curriculum for individual architects looking to formalise and deepen their practice.

Teams and organisations: For engineering organisations, I offer private cohorts, workshops, and corporate training programmes built around your team's specific context and delivery constraints. These are bespoke. Scope, format, and duration agreed based on what your team actually needs.

Cohort programmes

Education pillar

Structured learning

Multi-week programmes for teams, online or in person.

Company or conference talks

Education pillar

Keynotes & internal stages

Keynotes and internal talks for engineering orgs, summits, and conference stages.

Corporate training

Education pillar

Hands-on curriculum

Hands-on workshops on architecture, micro-frontends, and delivery, built around decisions your team is facing now, not toy examples.

02

Consulting

I offer strategic architecture advisory for teams navigating distributed systems, micro-frontends, and cloud-native design. Engagements range from a focused one-day review to a long-term retained partnership, structured around the decisions you're actually facing, not a generic assessment framework.

Get in touch

How partnerships work in practice, Standards.

I don't take on engagements where the decision has already been made and the brief is to validate it. I'm not useful as a rubber stamp. If you're looking for someone to tell you what you want to hear, I'm the wrong call.

Architecture review

Consulting pillar

Diagnostic & recommendations

Short diagnostic, usually one to two weeks, with a written report on your riskiest decisions, options, and trade-offs you can act on.

Retained advisory

Consulting pillar

Ongoing partnership

Ongoing cadence: regular sessions, async decisions when they matter, and written check-ins. Scope tailored per client, typically three to six months or more.

Go-to-market through education

Consulting pillar

Cross-discipline with content

Positioning and narrative for how technical buyers see the problem. Pair with Content for programme formats and Partner for how sponsorship works end to end.

03

Content Creation

Go-to-market through educational content, not advertising. When you partner with me, you reach 110,000+ engineers, architects and tech leaders who engage because the content earns their attention, not because they were targeted.

Partnership formats include sponsored newsletter issues, podcast episodes, video series, and multi-channel bundles.

Partner with us

Editorial and partnership standards, Standards.

Newsletter sponsorship

Content pillar

Dear Architects, Token by Token & Building Micro-Frontends

Sponsored issue in Dear Architects or Building Micro-Frontends, same editorial bar as organic issues.

Video case studies

Content pillar

Cinematic and educational videos

In-studio case study video: your product inside a real architecture story, not a demo reel.

Bundled campaigns

Content pillar

Multi-channel packages

Multi-channel bundles, video, shorts, newsletters, and more, scoped to one campaign narrative.

Real partnerships.
What actually happened.

Video · Sponsored
Scaling frontend architecture with modern tooling
A deep-dive video produced in partnership with a developer tooling company, framed as an architectural case study, not a product demo. Scripted, shot in-studio, and distributed across YouTube and the newsletter.
The result: The audience engaged with the product as part of the argument, not as an interruption. Completion rate significantly above platform average.
Newsletter · Sponsored issue
The architecture of real-time systems at scale
A sponsored issue of Dear Architects exploring event-driven architecture patterns, with the partner's platform used as a concrete reference implementation. Written in the same voice and depth as every other issue.
The result: Open rate held at editorial baseline, no drop-off from the sponsorship placement. Sponsor reported qualified inbound within 48 hours of the issue going live.
Podcast · Series partnership
Micro-frontends in production, a three-part series
A three-episode arc on Micro-Frontends in the Trenches, with a partner's tooling featured across guests who had actually used it in production. No scripts, no talking points, just honest practitioner conversations.
The result: Three episodes, zero drop in listener retention. Guest-led validation outperformed every direct ad the partner had run that quarter.
On stage

350+ talks.
Four continents.

350+ sessions across re:Invent, QCon, GOTO, NDC, Devoxx and O'Reilly have built an audience that event programmers trust to fill rooms. If you're programming a conference or planning an internal summit, let's talk.

Trusted by teams at
AWS O'Reilly InfoQ Google Zephyr Cloud
IcePanel Ona Inngest DAZN
What it's like to work together

Ready to work
together?

Luca
Mezzalira

I've spent twenty years in the rooms where architecture decisions get made, DAZN during a platform migration that couldn't fail, AWS across twelve re:Invent stages, and now independently through 50 Cents Media.

I have spent twenty years on both sides of architecture decisions: as the person making them under pressure, and as the person brought in to help others make them well. That is what I do now through 50 Cents Media, consulting, educating, and building content that reaches the people still in the thick of it.

I left AWS in 2025 after five years running EMEA go-to-market for serverless to focus full-time on 50 Cents Media, consulting, educating, and building content that lasts.


Work with me
Luca Mezzalira
Career timeline

Career journey
at a glance

2004

Flash Developer

remedia

Padua, Veneto, Italy

Built interactive media projects and laid the foundations for frontend craftsmanship.

2004

Flash Developer

remedia

Padua, Veneto, Italy

Built interactive media projects and laid the foundations for frontend craftsmanship.

Jan 2005

Owner

m.art3

Padua, Veneto, Italy

Ran an independent studio for 6+ years, shipping client work and growing technical direction responsibilities.

Aug 2011

Co-Owner & CTO

Inside a bit

Padova

Led a 12-person team, shaped product and technology roadmaps, and delivered R&D consulting.

Jan 2014

Technical Lead

Gamesys

London Area, UK

Led agile teams shipping AAA player-first games and reduced delivery time from 9 to 3 months.

Jun 2015

Solutions Architect

Massive Interactive, Inc

London Area, UK

Worked with distributed teams, improved delivery quality, and drove architecture choices across TV and web products.

Aug 2016

Solutions Architect

DAZN

London Area, UK

Joined DAZN architecture leadership during high-growth OTT platform expansion.

Jul 2017

Chief Architect

DAZN

London Area, UK

Drove architecture direction and platform evolution across multi-market streaming targets.

Jan 2019

VP of Architecture

DAZN

London Area, UK

Led migration of a streaming platform serving millions of concurrent users toward a micro-frontends architecture, the engagement that became the O'Reilly book. Led governance for OTT architecture and a 10-architect team across 40 delivery targets; introduced micro-frontends and serverless at scale.

Jan 2021

Principal Solutions Architect

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Greater London, UK

Helped Media and Entertainment customers in EMEA design and improve their software architecture, working with some of the biggest brands in the EMEA broadcaster industry.

Jul 2022

Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Greater London, UK

Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect, EMEA. Twelve re:Invent talks. Defined the serverless GTM strategy across Europe. Focused on advanced serverless architecture strategy and delivery with customers and partners.

Jun 2026

Director

50 cents media

Greater London, UK

Independent practice: architecture consulting, QCon/InfoQ cohort facilitation, and content reaching 110,000+ practitioners weekly. Leads strategy and delivery for the 50 cents media brand: practitioner-led technical content, architecture advisory, and speaking.

Next?

If you are building architecture capability in your organisation, or looking for someone who has operated at this scale to advise on what you are building next, let's talk.

Books

Building Micro-Frontends
2nd edition

The definitive guide to designing, migrating, and scaling micro-frontends in any context.

400+Pages
116Diagrams
1,000+Happy teams
View the book
In the studio
Studio or stage video, drop your clip here
By the numbers
3

O'Reilly books authored, including Building Micro-Frontends, the definitive text on the pattern

350+

Conference talks at re:Invent, QCon, GOTO, NDC, O'Reilly, from Silicon Valley to Japan

110k+

Combined reach across LinkedIn, newsletters and podcast platforms

20+

Years of experience spanning startups, scale-ups and global enterprises

Top 20%

Video podcast worldwide on Spotify

5

Active content platforms reaching engineers, architects and tech leaders every week

On LinkedIn

What I am
talking about

Four recent posts, architecture, systems, and how technical audiences actually engage. Hover a card to read the full post.

What it's like to work together

Ready to
collaborate?

Partnerships

Partner with Luca Mezzalira and 50 Cents Media

110,000+ engineers, architects and tech leaders. One consistent voice they have chosen to follow.

If you are trying to reach a technical audience that does not respond to traditional advertising, this is a different kind of conversation. I do not sell ad slots. I help partners reach an audience that trusts me, by working with them to create something that audience will actually want to read, watch, or listen to.

The audience

The people who read, watch, and listen to 50 Cents Media content are senior. They have budgets. They make or heavily influence technology decisions. They are not passive consumers. They subscribe, share, and act on content that earns their attention.

  • 15,800+ subscribers to Dear Architects, a weekly newsletter for software architects, consistently outperforming B2B email benchmarks
  • 3,800+ subscribers to Building Micro-Frontends, fortnightly, practitioner-first
  • 110,000+ combined reach across LinkedIn, YouTube, and podcast platforms

This is not a general developer audience. It is a concentrated community of people who take architecture seriously.

Three ways to partner

Newsletter

The most straightforward format. You share your brief, I frame it for the audience. I know what lands in this context and what does not, so rather than running your copy as-is, I will tell you upfront how to position it for the best result. Fast turnaround, clear labelling, no surprises.

Best for: developer tools, cloud platforms, architecture-adjacent products with a clear technical use case.

Podcast

More collaborative. We work together from brief through to final episode, shaping the angle, agreeing on the framing, making sure the way your product appears in the conversation is both honest and useful to the listener. The editorial direction stays with me, but the best episodes come from partners who are willing to think alongside me about what the audience actually needs to hear.

Best for: companies with a genuine story to tell about how their product is used in production, ideally with a customer or practitioner who can speak to it directly.

Video

Where the collaboration goes deepest. We co-create from the start. The concept, the narrative, the way your technology is demonstrated. I bring the architectural perspective and the production; you bring the product knowledge and the business context. During post-production, you have a defined number of revision rounds to make sure the technical detail is accurate and the representation feels right. Scope agreed upfront.

Best for: companies that want something that lives beyond a campaign, an educational asset that continues to drive inbound long after the initial release.

How it works

Every partnership starts the same way: a short conversation about your goals and your audience. From there I will tell you how I think we can make it work, and if a different format would serve you better, I will say so.

A note on editorial independence: the reason this audience pays attention is that they trust the content is not written for the sponsor. That trust is the asset you are accessing when you partner here. The educational angle, the framing, and the conclusions remain mine, developed collaboratively with you where it serves the content, but never directed by you. Partners who understand this get better results, because the audience can tell the difference.

The conversation about framing, angle, and what the audience will respond to happens before anything is written or filmed. In my experience, that conversation is where most of the value is. Partners leave it with a clearer sense of what they are trying to achieve, regardless of what we decide to do together.

For labelling, independence, and what we do not take on, see Standards.

Have a different idea?

The formats above are starting points, not the full picture. If you have something in mind that does not fit neatly into a newsletter slot or a video brief, send it through anyway. Some of the best partnerships start with an idea that does not have a name yet. If there is a way to make it work for this audience, we will find it together.

Ready to
scope a programme?

Editorial

Standards

How I create content, and how partnerships work in practice.

Every week I read widely. Papers, posts, threads, talks, conversations with practitioners in the field. My job is not to add more voices to an already noisy space. It is to curate the ideas that matter, stress-test them against twenty years of production experience, and give them back to the community in a form that is actually useful.

I think of it as giving a voice to the people doing the work, not the people talking about it.

That means I am selective about what goes out. Not because I follow a set of rules, but because I know this audience well: what they find useful, what they see through immediately, what makes them close the tab. I have been one of them for two decades. I still am.

When a partner comes to 50 Cents Media, I bring that knowledge into the room with them. My role is not to decide whether their story is worth telling. It is to help them find the version of their story that this audience will actually engage with. That is a collaborative process, and in my experience, it produces better results for the partner than any brief they could have written alone.

How partnerships work

The short version: I help partners reach an audience that does not respond to traditional advertising, by working with them to create something the audience genuinely wants to read, watch, or listen to.

Here is how that works in practice, across the three formats.

Newsletter placements are the most straightforward format. You share your brief, I frame it for the audience. I know what lands in this context and what does not, so rather than running your copy as-is, I will tell you upfront how to position it for the best result. Fast turnaround, clear labelling, no surprises.

In all three formats, every sponsored placement is clearly labelled. The audience always knows. That transparency is not a constraint, and it is part of why the placement is worth something.

Principles

Editorial independence

One thing will not change regardless of who sponsors an issue, an episode, or a video: the editorial judgement is mine. The framing, the argument, the examples, the conclusions. Partners contribute context about their product and can flag factual inaccuracies. They do not shape the angle, select the guests, or influence what I say about anything beyond their own technology. If you are reading or watching something here, you are getting my honest assessment of it, full stop.

What I will tell you before we start

If I do not think a partnership is a good fit for this audience, I will say so before we go any further, and I will explain why. Sometimes that means suggesting a different format. Sometimes it means we are not the right match. Either way, you will know early, not after we have both invested time in something that was never going to land.

If I think we can make it work, I will tell you how. The conversation about framing, angle, and what the audience will respond to happens before anything is written or filmed. That conversation is where most of the value is.

Can partners review content before publication?

For video and podcast, yes. Review rounds are built into the process and agreed upfront. For newsletters, I share the framing approach before anything is written so there are no surprises at publication. In all cases, partners can flag factual inaccuracies about their own product. Editorial direction, architectural argument, and overall framing remain mine.

What if you cover a company you have a commercial relationship with?

Sponsored placements are always labelled. Any editorial coverage of a partner, in a separate issue, episode, or video, is based on technical merit and independent of the commercial arrangement. If both exist at the same time, I will say so.

Want to understand what a partnership could look like
for you?

Let's
talk

Email

info@50cents.media

Based in

124–128 City Road
London, EC1V 2NX
United Kingdom

Available for projects worldwide

I read every message and respond within 2 business days.

Newsletter · Weekly

Dear Architects, Weekly Newsletter for Software Architects

A weekly newsletter dedicated to software architects, covering system design decisions, team topology, architectural patterns, and the evolving role of the architect in the AI era.

Subscribe free
15.8k+
Subscribers
Weekly
Cadence
2023
Founded

15,800+ subscribers, in a niche where most architecture newsletters top out at 3,000. Open rate consistently outperforms the B2B email benchmark.

What it is

Dear Architects is a practitioner-first newsletter. Each issue takes a single architectural question and unpacks it with honesty and precision. The audience is senior engineers, lead architects, and engineering managers building real systems.

The newsletter serves as the editorial companion to the Dear Architects video podcast, with issues often expanding on interview themes or exploring counter-arguments raised by guests.

Recent issues, coming soon

Read
Dear Architects

Newsletter · Fortnightly

Token by Token, AI Architecture Newsletter for Practitioners

AI in the software development lifecycle, from agentic architecture to the evolving role of the architect. For practitioners navigating the AI era with rigour, not hype.

Subscribe free
Apr '25
Launch date
Fortnightly
Cadence
Growing
Subscriber base

What it is

Token by Token explores how AI is reshaping the software development lifecycle, not from a researcher's perspective, but from the architect's. Each issue tackles a concrete question: how do you contain agentic systems? What does DDD mean when agents cross subdomain boundaries?

The thesis: AI agents don't change software architecture, they expose every weakness in it. Each issue uses a concrete case to test that argument. Some weeks the thesis holds. Some weeks it breaks. The uncertainty is the point.

Recent issues, coming soon

Read
Token by Token

Newsletter · Fortnightly

Building Micro-Frontends, The Newsletter for MFE Practitioners

Fortnightly deep-dives for developers and architects working with micro-frontend architecture.

Subscribe free
3.8k+
Subscribers
Fortnightly
Cadence
Dev-first
Audience

What it is

The companion newsletter to Building Micro-Frontends (O'Reilly, 2nd edition), the book that has shaped how thousands of engineering teams think about frontend architecture at scale.

Written for developers and architects implementing micro-frontends in production. Each issue covers a specific pattern, tooling decision, or architectural trade-off, grounded in the Micro-Frontend Canvas framework.

Topics span Module Federation v1 and v2, Native Federation, Single SPA, Next.js multi-zones, Astro server islands, and the organisational patterns that make or break micro-frontend adoption.

Recent issues, coming soon

Subscribe to
Building Micro-Frontends

Podcast · Video

Micro-Frontends in the Trenches, Podcast for Architecture Teams

Practitioners sharing real-world micro-frontend stories, the wins, the mistakes, and the decisions that shaped their systems.

YouTube · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

YouTubeSpotifyApple Podcasts
Watch / Listen
5
Platforms
Video
Format
Expert
Guests

What it is

A video podcast featuring the engineers and architects who have shipped micro-frontend systems at scale. Guests include Manfred Steyer (Native Federation), Peter Eijgermans (Dutch Railways), and more.

Conversations go deep on implementation reality, what the blog posts do not tell you, how teams actually organised themselves, and what they would do differently.

Episode list, coming soon

Watch
the Trenches

Video Podcast

Dear Architects, Video Podcast on Software Architecture Decisions

Video conversations with architects on the decisions that define systems. Honest, deep, practitioner-to-practitioner.

YouTube · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

YouTubeSpotifyApple Podcasts
Watch
Video
Format
Weekly
Cadence
Growing
Audience

What it is

The Dear Architects video podcast extends the newsletter into long-form conversation. Guests include practitioners like Susanne Kaiser, Vlad, and Jacqui Read, architects with genuine opinions and the experience to back them up.

Each episode picks a specific architectural tension and unpacks it without false resolution. The goal is to model good architectural reasoning, not to hand out easy answers.

Episode list, coming soon

Watch
Dear Architects

Video · Brand Content

Video Case Studies, Educational Brand Content for Technology Partners

Educational video content produced for brand partners, demonstrating technology through real architectural narrative, not product demos.

Discuss a project

What it is

Case study videos produced in partnership with technology companies, telling the story of how their product solves a real architectural problem, presented through Luca's lens as a practitioner. These are not product demos. They are architectural explorations that happen to feature a tool.

Filmed in the purpose-built garden room studio in London, or on location. Full production, scripting, and distribution included.

01
Case Study, Coming soon
02
Case Study, Coming soon

Let's work
together