Category Archives: architecture of sorts

Maybe you are going to need it

In the beginning, there was the green field. The lead developer, who may have been the only developer, agreed with the product owner (or “the other member of the company” as they were known) what they would build for the … Continue reading

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Longer, fuller stacks

Thinks to self: OK, this “full-stack” project is going to be fairly complex. I need: a database. I don’t need it yet, I’ll defer that. a thing that runs on the server, listens for HTTP requests from a browser, builds … Continue reading

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Mach and Matchmaker: kernel and language support for object-oriented distributed systems

About this paper Mach and Matchmaker: kernel and language support for object-oriented distributed systems , Michael B. Jones and Richard F. Rashid, from the proceedings of OOPSLA ’86. Notes Yes, 1986 was a long time ago, but the topics of … Continue reading

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The Fragile Manifesto

A lot of what I’ve been reading and thinking about of late is about the agile backlash. More speed, lower velocity reflects on IT teams pursuing “deliver more/newer IT” at the cost of “help the company achieve its mission”. Grooming … Continue reading

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The App that Wasn’t (Yet)

One of the early goals written into the mission statement of the Labrary was an eponymous app for organising research notes. I’ve used Mekentosj Springer Readcube Papers for years, and encountered Mendeley and others, and found that they were all … Continue reading

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Product teams: our products are not our products

Woah, too many products. Let me explain. No, it will take too long, let me summarise. Sometimes, people running software organisations call their teams “product teams”, and organise them around particular “products”. I do not believe that this is a … Continue reading

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Mapping software engineering tools

Despite the theory that everything can be done in software (and of course, anything that can’t be done could in principle be approximated using numerical methods, or fudged using machine learning), software engineering itself, the business of writing software, seems … Continue reading

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Microservices for the Desktop

In OOP the Easy Way, I make the argument that microservices are a rare instance of OOP done well: Microservice adopters are able to implement different services in different technologies, to think about changes to a given service only in … Continue reading

Posted in architecture of sorts, code-level, OOP | Tagged | 1 Comment

Introducing: the Labrary

Is it that a month in the laboratory will save an hour in the library, or the other way around? A little more conversation, a little less action? There are things to learn from both the library and the laboratory, … Continue reading

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Let’s talk about self-documenting code

You think your code is self-documenting. That it doesn’t need comments or Doxygen or little diagrams, because it’s clear from the code what it does. I do not think that that is true. Even if your reader has at least … Continue reading

Posted in advancement of the self, architecture of sorts, documentation | 8 Comments