abstraction

5 years, 11 months ago

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 463

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I’m back for another appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast. This week’s episode, number 463, features Tom’s essay on big picture stories. This is followed by our Form Follows Function segment discussing my post “Management, Simple and Wrong – Semantics, Systems, and Self-Correction”. Jeremy Berriault‘s QA corner finishes the cast with […]

6 years, 2 months ago

Organizations as Systems – Kurosawa, Clausewitz, and Chess

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In order to respond appropriately to the context we find ourselves in, it’s helpful that we be able to correctly define that context. It’s something humans aren’t always good at. Not too long ago, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War was all the rage as among executives. While the book contains some excellent lessons that […]

6 years, 2 months ago

Management, Simple and Wrong – Semantics, Systems, and Self-Correction

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Simple responses to complex situations are both seductive and dangerous. The difficulty in juggling lots of variables tempts us to employ abstraction so as to avoid being overwhelmed. Abraham Maslow’s observation, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”, applies. […]

6 years, 4 months ago

This is not a project

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My apologies to René Magritte, as I appropriate his point, if not his iconic painting. After I posted “Storming on Design”, it sparked a discussion with theslowdiyer around context and change. In that discussion, theslowdiyer commented: ‘you don’t adhere to a plan for any longer than it makes sense to.’ Heh, agree. I wonder if […]

6 years, 11 months ago

Babies, Bathwater, and Software Architects

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I try to be disciplined about my writing (picking themes, creating a backlog, collecting notes and links on those topics, etc.), but it seems like serendipity won’t be denied, no matter what I do. On the same day that XKCD published this cartoon, Erik Dietrich published “Software Architect as a Developer Pension Plan”. While I […]

7 years, 5 months ago

Abstract Dangers – When ‘And’ Meets ‘Or’

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There’s an old saying that if you put one foot in a bucket of ice and the other in a bucket of boiling water, on average you’re comfortable. Sometimes analyzing information in the aggregate obscures rather than enlightens. A statistician named Francis Anscombe pointed out this same principle in a more visual (though less colorful) […]

9 years, 1 month ago

PaaS is lacking a vision on application development

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Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is all about abstraction and automation. Abstracting away from underlying technology layers by automation. That’s basically what is happening on each layer of a cloud architecture, from hardware to IaaS, to foundational PaaS, to aPaaS. All this abstraction and automation is aimed at making application deployment a one-click or one-command experience for the developer. It makes deployment a self-service experience for the developer, which eliminates hand-offs and thus improves.

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