11–20 of 20 posts
- always late and
- always more expensive than planned.
"If Builders Built Buildings the Way Programmers Wrote Programs, Then the First Woodpecker That Came Along Would Destroy Civilization"
Software systems have always felt more organic to me than any building. A building will go years without any major changes or renovations. Your average modern software application sees multiple changes per day. And the functionality of the software evolves quite iteratively and rapidly over time. It also has to respond to various environmental stresses.
You don't change the language your application is written in every day, and likewise the structure of a building isn't changed every day. But the stuff inside a building does change frequently.
Software systems have always felt more organic to me than any building. A building will go years without any major changes or renovations. Your average modern software application sees multiple changes per day. And the functionality of the software evolves quite iteratively and rapidly over time. It also has to respond to various environmental stresses.
Software systems have always felt more organic to me than any building. A building will go years without any major changes or renovations. Your average modern software application sees multiple changes per day. And the functionality of the software evolves quite iteratively and rapidly over time. It also has to respond to various environmental stresses.
Sure walls being moved is a more rare occurance, but it too happened multiple times during the past years.
I think there are undeniable parallels between software and architecture. Architecture just operates on a longer time scale.
Software is more like keeping quicksand in your hands.
The construction of houses take mature engineering principles and calculations of a physical world to create buildings standing for centuries.
Most (not all) changes after construction is veneer - on the surface and replacing of bits 1:1.
Software on the other hand need constant attention and massive changes to the very foundation is not uncommon. It might go as deep as a change in hardware, say moving from one arch to another, or changing of the software architecture such as moving to a distributed, eventually consistent persistence layer or vice versa.
It’s not like concrete stops functioning if you don’t keep touching it either. Don’t get me started on build pipelines, testing, integrations etc etc
And next up: product! Yesterday we thought it was a new empire state building buuuut it turned out we need to build a modern day coliseum.
Followed by “project management” - this may be the most obvious sign that we’re off in comparison. A building need project management! Software on the other hand is often ruined by it, as software is supposed to be malleable.
One is soft, the other is hard.
Trying to liken software production to building construction is something I’ve seen create various problems in this field of ours for a long time.
Why even think about software as a building at all? Just think about it as software. I don't understand the urge to draw parallels to other fields.
I think it's a reference to the book "How buildings learn". I haven't read the whole book but as far as I have read it goes like this: people try to guess what the good building supposed to be and build it but later they have a change of heart or either some other people move to that building and have completely different outlooks of what their home should be like. Author argues there is levels to buildings and we sh…
I often ended up applying this simple principle to software, especially design systems, e.g. in atomic design where atom, molecules, organism, etc. Can be developed as layers with different pace of change and optimized around it.
I'm curious if anybody knows where the concept came from originally. Was there already something like that in Greek philosophy, or was introduced with the study of complex systems? Or maybe it was indeed from architecture?
Software systems have always felt more organic to me than any building. A building will go years without any major changes or renovations. Your average modern software application sees multiple changes per day. And the functionality of the software evolves quite iteratively and rapidly over time. It also has to respond to various environmental stresses.
As someone working in a building that is 250 years old I can assire you that it too sees multiple changes a day. Minor changes sure. A wall being painted here, a cable being inserted there, a entrance being moved etc. Sure walls being moved is a more rare occurance, but it too happened multiple times during the past years. I think there are undeniable parallels between software and architecture. Architecture just ope…