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Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#101

Post by sinuhe69 »

edelans wrote: post #46
taeric wrote: post #43

There was an article recently ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30936189 ) that was basically about how far you can get with a simple architecture. One thing I don't remember explicitly called out, is that most all architectures are grown. There are scarily few situations where starting with the complicated idea is a good idea.

Gall's Law : > A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

So that instead of focusing on the architecture as it-is, we should pay more attention to the evolving stories of software architectures because we can learn more from them.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#103

Post by rramadass »

theginger wrote: post #76

I came across this a while back It is a court document from one of the UK post office horizon IT system scandal. It has a very detailed review of the system and its history dumbed down to the level a lawyer could (maybe) understand. It stands out because it is quite hard to find examples of this level of detail about such a large scale distributed system which aren't internet / web tech companies. https://www.judicia…

Nice!

Just browsed through it and was surprised at the great explanation of RDBMS' provided.

Excerpt:

21. The main use of a relational database is securely to store large volumes of structured information. The way it does so can be understood as having large numbers (tens, hundreds or even more) of different spreadsheets (which are called tables) and which are linked to one another. Two different tables in a database are linked to one another (in a 'relation') when they both have one or more columns with the same meaning and share values in those columns.

I think this is also a important lesson on how to write simple, direct and succinct documentation; no unnecessary fancy "methodologies/processes" required (i am now a fan of Dr. Worden :-).

Well worth reading in entirety.

PS: Any other overviews of "less sexy" software systems that you can share (eg. Banking, Insurance, Railway Systems etc.)? I am of the opinion that these are the real success stories of the Software Industry. They are battle tested and proven over time.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#105

Post by eashman »

explaingarlic wrote: post #86

It's good to note that it depends largely on the company you're looking at. I work for a very large organization (~£6bil in revenue, £700mil in profit last year) and we suffer from the "mud" problem - nothing about our technology stack is particularly special, it's just a hodgepodge of many different technologies that struggle to work together. That's not entirely fair - I work within a very unique solution inside of…

I often point out an anecdote from my early e-commerce days in the late 90s where a customer wanted in-store pickup like everyone else they saw on the web doing. But they just had purchased an already outdated (but IBM so nobody got fired) Point Of Sale system for 40 stores which did inventory management as a batch at the close of business each day over Frame Relay lines or even dialup. The concept of a VPN was alien to them.

Since they were selling some limited edition high priced items that were allocated to each store, there were often only 1 or 2 at a given location of what would be a popular item.

So you can imagine when I explained that the huge investment in the legacy system just a few years before was a big blocker for ‘pick up in store’.

I think we had to hardcode something that would remove an item for sale online if there were less than 2 left or some awful hack like that to reduce customer complaints.

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