Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Gene Hughson Long-time readers know that I have a rather varied set of interests and that I’ve got a “thing” for history, particularly military history. Knowing that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was recently reading an article titled “Cyber is the fourth dimension of war” (ground, sea and air being the first three […]
In one of my earlier posts about technical debt, I differentiated between intentional debt (that taken on deliberately and purposefully) and accidental debt (that which just accrues over time without rhyme or reason or record). Dealing with (in the sense of evaluating, tracking, and resolving it) technical debt is obviously a consideration for someone in […]
Just when I thought I was done posting for the week, they suck me back in. Juicero started lighting up my Twitter feed a little while ago. For those, like me, who have no earthly idea what Juicero is, it’s a startup that makes an “Internet-connected kitchen appliance”: Juicero’s flagship product is a $699 […]
Twenty-plus years in IT have led me to believe that there are very few absolutes when it comes to software systems. Two that do seem to hold true are these: Creating systems is esteemed far more highly than maintaining systems. Systems that are not maintained, will decay. There are a variety of reasons for this […]
Once again, I’m making an appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast. This week’s episode, number 438, features Tom’s essay on using sizing for software testing, Kim Pries with a Software Sensei column (canned solutions), and a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Organizations as Systems and Innovation”. In this […]
Well, this turned out to be very much a different post than what I’d first thought. Last Thursday, CIO published an article titled “Your Pebble smartwatch will live on when Pebble’s servers shut down” that had good news for owners of the Pebble smartwatch: But now that Pebble has been acquired by Fitbit and is […]
You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometimes well you just might find You get what you need When it comes to systems, you can’t always get what you want, but you do get what you design (intentionally or not), whether it’s what you need or not. In other words, the […]
There are very valid reasons for considering a microservice architecture (MSA) when building/evolving an application. In my opinion, however, forcing modularity isn’t one of those very valid reasons. Just the other day, I saw tweet from Simon Brown saying this same thing: I still like his comment from two years back: “I’ll keep saying […]
People like easy answers. Why spend time analyzing and evaluating when you can just take some thing or some technique that someone else has already put to use and be done with it? Why indeed? I mean, “me too” is a valid strategy, right? And we don’t want people to get off message, right? And […]
Ten days ago, when I wrote the post “Uber and the Cost of a Culture of Corruption”, I said that assuming there will be negative consequences (both legal and financial) from the incidents in the news, then it is in Uber’s best interests to fix the problem that led to them in the first place. […]
Serendipity is a wonderful (and sometimes entertaining) thing. Monday afternoon, two tweets wound up one after the other in my timeline, one interesting and one “interesting” (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which is which): and My favorite definition for the word “innovation” comes from Scott Berkun: If you must […]
Even before I hit the “Publish” button on Monday’s post, “Regulating Software Development”, I had already started composing this post in my head. In that post I had used the words “corrupt culture” in passing. I needed to expand on that, because I believe that’s what lies at the heart of Uber’s cascading collection of […]