Where do we start with EA? – a practical question

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You’re an experienced enterprise-architect, having spent most your working life in one industry. You now have a new job, in a new company, in an industry that’s entirely new to you. And the company at present has no architecture at all: you’re ‘it’. Where on earth do you start? That’s the situation my friend Alan […]

How do we make EA make sense?

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Those notions of ‘whole-enterprise architecture’ that I’ve been describing in the ‘no-plan Plan‘ series of posts make solid sense to a fair few people – particularly those who’ve some experience of systems-thinking, design-thinking and the like. But it’s painfully clear that it doesn’t seem to make much sense to anyone else: and I must admit […]

The Chief Process Office of an Agile Organization

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The IDEF0 Pattern and the Organization’s Value EngineIn my book, Organizational Economics: the Formation of Wealth, I use the IDEF0 pattern to model the organization.  This pattern has three internal components, Control, Process, and Mechanisms (t…

Link Collection — October 23, 2011

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  • There’s Something Happening Here – NYTimes.com

    “There are two unified theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of “The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of “The Big Shift.” You decide.”

    tags: NYTimes.com friedman

  • Mechanical Sympathy: Single Writer Principle

    Single Writer Principle
    When trying to build a highly scalable system the single biggest limitation on scalability is having multiple writers contend for any item of data or resource. Sure, algorithms can be bad, but let’s assume they have a reasonable Big O notation so we’ll focus on the scalability limitations of the systems design.

    I keep seeing people just accept having multiple writers as the norm. There is a lot of research in computer science for managing this contention that boils down to 2 basic approaches. One is to provide mutual exclusion to the contended resource while the mutation takes place; the other is to take an optimistic strategy and swap in the changes if the underlying resource has not changed while you created the new copy.

    tags: single Writer patterns

  • disruptor – Concurrent Programming Framework – Google Project Hosting

    What is the Disruptor?

    LMAX aims to be the fastest trading platform in the world. Clearly, in order to achieve this we needed to do something special to achieve very low-latency and high-throughput with our Java platform. Performance testing showed that using queues to pass data between stages of the system was introducing latency, so we focused on optimising this area.

    The Disruptor is the result of our research and testing. We found that cache misses at the CPU-level, and locks requiring kernel arbitration are both extremely costly, so we created a framework which has “mechanical sympathy” for the hardware it’s running on, and that’s lock-free.

    This is not a specialist solution, it’s not designed to work only for a financial application. The Disruptor is a general-purpose mechanism for solving a difficult problem in concurrent programming.

    tags: disruptor concurrency java

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection — October 9, 2011
  2. Link Collection – July 3, 2011
  3. Link Collection- July 17, 2011

Satisficing Behavior

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In economic theory, the is an assumption that customers and consumers decide on products that satisfy their demand.  This has simplified customer behavior sufficiently for microeconomics theory to create mathematical models.  For th…

The no-plan ‘Plan’ for whole-enterprise architecture – a summary

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That description of ‘the plan that is no plan’, about the direction that I’m moving into after moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture, kind of ended up a bit longer than intended. (No surprise there, unfortunately… ) Oh well. In effect, though, it’s also a kind of ‘manifesto’ for whole-enterprise architecture – about what needs to […]

The no-plan Plan: people in architecture

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Okay, time for the final theme in that ‘no-plan Plan‘ – which somehow seems to be turning into a kind of ‘manifesto for whole-enterprise architecture’ or something like that, for some reason. Oh well. Anyway, this part’s about what is perhaps the most-serious ‘the Forgotten’ in almost all current ‘enterprise’-architectures, namely people. I’ll keep this one […]