Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
What does the World War II naval campaign known as the Battle of the Atlantic have to do with learning and innovation? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Early in the war, Britain found itself in a precarious position. While being an island nation provided defensive advantages, it also came with logistical challenges. Food, […]
Sometimes, what seemed to be a really good idea just doesn’t turn out that way in the end. In my opinion, a lack of a systems approach to problem solving makes that type of outcome much more likely. Simplistic responses to issues that fail to deal with problems holistically can backfire. Such ill-considered solutions not […]
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 […]
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 403, features Tom’s essay on Agile practices at scale, Kim Pries on transformations, and a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “NPM, Tay, and the Need for Design”. Although the specific controversies have died down since we recorded the segment, […]
We’ve all heard the sayings about history repeating. Did we pay attention? Did we actually hear what was said, or were we just in the room when it was mentioned? Did we learn anything? Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading posts on innovation for more than seven months. His last post, “Black hat innovation”, […]
This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 395, features Tom’s essay on productivity, Kim Pries on “how software developers leverage assimilation and accommodation in the acquisition of knowledge”, and a Form Follows Function installment on accidental innovation. Tom and I discuss my post “Accidental Innovation”. Without an environment that […]
Last week, in a post titled “The Flaw in All Things”, John Vincent discussed the problem of seeing “the flaw in all things”: It’s overwhelming. It’s paralyzing. I can’t finish a project because I keep finding things that could cause problems. I even mentioned this to our CTO and CEO at one point when we […]
I had the pleasure of appearing on episode #367 of Architecture Corner, “Fail fast, learn fast”, with Greger Wikstrand and Casimir Artmann. In the episode, we discuss learning, experiments, and the idea of “fail fast” in relation to the recent incident with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbot, @TayandYou. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much […]
Take a couple of seconds and watch the clip in the tweet below: While it would be incredibly difficult to predict that exact outcome, it is also incredibly easy to foresee that it’s a possibility. As the saying goes, “forewarned is forearmed”. Being forewarned and forearmed is an important part of what an architect does. […]
From my very first post, I’ve been writing on the subject of “accidental architecture”, which is also sometimes confused with “emergence”. From the picture on the right (which I used previously on a post titled “Accidental Architecture”), it should be easy to infer what my opinion is in regard to the idea that coherent system […]
Two articles from the same site (CIO.com), both dealing with planned innovations, but with dramatically different results: “Report: Twitter’s algorithmic timeline may arrive next week” reports that rumors (or “rumors”) of Twitter switching from a chronological timeline to one curated algorithmically has led to an uprising under the hashtag #RIPTwitter. Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, has […]
Much has been written about the potential benefits of designing applications using microservices. A fair amount has also been written about the potential pitfalls. On this blog, there’s been a combination of both. As I noted in “Are Microservices the Next Big Thing?”: It’s not the technique itself that makes or breaks a design, it’s […]