The reason we can’t just wish away or “fix” complexity is that every solution — whether it’s a technology or methodology — redistributes complexity in some way. Solutions reorganize problems. When microservices emerged, they seemingly solved many of the maintenance and development challenges posed by monolithic architectures
When I think about design, I more naturally think about it the other way around: how to decompose the whole into a set of parts that will work together to accomplish the system goals. But of course Conway is right that those parts do have to fit together to produce the intended whole again.
As software developers, we might think that our main job is to write code and create solutions. But really, our most important job is to understand the problems we're trying to solve. In this article, we'll talk about why it's important to understand the problem domain, why this helps us build better software, and how developers can get better at it.
What are the characteristics of a good software engineer? It's a topic many people would argue endlessly about. This is not surprising given we are effectively living in the era of software alchemy. Some of the best programmers draw on strong scientific and engineering backgrounds and combine this with craft-like coding skills in a virtuous feedback cycle. In this talk, we explore the individual practices and techniques that can help bring out the engineer in you.
I have a hunch that once people saw the economic potential of software, they started looking for ways to "scale it up" and we haven't stopped searching yet.
Borrowing from Thomas Kuhn, Robert Floyd introduced the notion of a programming paradigm. Today, paradigms are constantly debated. What might Kuhn tell us about this sad state of affairs? What can Programming learn from Philosophy?.
At the root of catastrophes in both code and life lies a pervasive fallacy: the attempt to model processes as if they were transactions. Join Avdi for an honest, sometimes raw retrospective on two decades of building a software development career. You’ll examine how personal philosophy impacts software design — and vice-versa. You’ll encounter the transactional fallacy and how it can hinder our attempts to build resilient systems. And you’ll explore how a narrative-oriented mindset can lead to both better code and a more joyful [...]
One of my all time favorite talks of AKay's, given in 2015.