Microservices or Monoliths – Fences and Neighbors

  At the end of my last post, “What Makes a Monolith Monolithic?”, I stated that I didn’t consider the term “monolithic” to be inherently derogatory. It is, rather, a descriptive term relating to the style of organizing an application’s architecture. Depending on the context the system operates within, a monolithic architectural style could lie […]

Organizations as Systems – Kurosawa, Clausewitz, and Chess

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 […]

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

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. […]

Evidence-based architecture?

Flicking through the BMJ again this week, I noticed an editorial on ‘EBM manifesto for better health’ (cite/URL: BMJ 2017;357:j2973), where ‘EBM’ stands for ‘Evidence-Based Medicine’. I’ve often noted that medicine and enterprise-architectures share several key characteristics, in particular an awkward

The bucket-list – a keyword-schema

I’ll admit it: there’s an awful lot of stuff on this website of mine. And there are so many tools and suchlike here that it can be difficult to find one’s way around, or to work out which tools to

The bucket-list – changing direction

I’ve given up on enterprise-architecture. Why? Several reasons, really. The main one is that, even now, enterprise-architecture still isn’t enterprise architecture – and there are still massive vested-interests against its ever being so. Its literal meaning should be ‘the architecture of the enterprise‘;

May Day, and a mayday for our world

And yeah, this is where it gets seriously scary. Not just for me: for just about everyone. I mentioned in the previous post that “I hate the money-economy”. It might be useful if I explained why? — Yes, this is May Day. Beltane,

Microservices, Monoliths, and Modularity

  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 […]

Square Pegs, Round Holes, and Silver Bullets

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 […]

Quantum Psycholosography

Why is everything so damned interesting? Some social media friends and I were discussing the huge amount of interesting (and potentially important) stuff that comes our way and that we can’t keep up with. New books and articles pile up half read on our physical or virtual bookshelves. In the last month articles on cognition, […]