Software Architecture Guide

you should probably take a look and filter it through your experience.

I find it ironic that that many of the people who write about architecture are consultants or writers. Consultants usually come into a project, make some decisions and write some code in a few months. Then they leave, without having to maintain the application. Of course they bring in fancy-named architecture patterns as one-size-fits-all solutions, leaving before the cracks on the approach show. Ever notice how little writing there is about iterative software design?

For writers, it seems they build a simple proof-of-concept solution, that is never deployed in production, documenting this process and showing it off as an example.

Yet, when it comes to writing about software architecture, this is 90% of the materials. Engineers who build this day in, day out, design systems from inception, iterate on them, code and deploy, then maintain and operate them for years - they barely share what approach they took. And it's none of this fancy-talk in articles like this one. It's not UML or other formal methods. It's simple documents, simple diagrams, lots of discussion about tradeoffs and tons of back-and-forth comments over Google Docs/O365 and in real life.

I'm at the point where I'm serioulsly debating writing something more substantial on how actual software design works at tech companies, when you're not a consultant or a writer, but an engineer who does this full-time, end-to-end, living with all the consequences of decisions and fixing mistakes after.

On the importance of prototyping, extensible MVPs, whiteboarding, documenting an initial design and getting feedback, iterating on it, architecture jams, design war rooms - and when starting again when the world/business changes substantially, keeping things running and migrating things over to the new system.

The same apply for kent beck early work on smalltalk (you can look at Junit) or his early work on the HotDraw editor (which was the source of many of the pattern in the Design Pattern book). Kent was one of the first adopter of smalltalk at the early 80 is techtronix, together with ward cunnighum (the inventor of wiki) and rebbeca swift brooks.

Robert Martin work is mainly driven by his consulting practice and tend to change based on the on going trend. At the 2000's he was working with Grady Booch, preaching UML and design before coding. Later he dropped that in favour of agile and TDD.

You do not see case studies since the industry simply does not really care. It is very trend prone.

Most of the adopted advances were actually "hacks". For example C++ was invented out of necessity to create "C with objects" by a single person in AT&T labs. Unix was hacked in 3 weeks. Java was invented to program toasters, etc.

Any attempt to develop tools and technique based on real research saw not adaptation - for example Ada at the 80s, UML at the 90's and early 2000, functional programming, TLA+ , etc.

(And there are plenty of things that industry does respect that came from academic research in the sense of new ideas. Rust, stereotypically the language of the trend-prone, draws on everything from Ada to functional programming. But unlike those it actually and demonstrably meets the needs of general-purpose programming in industry.)