> are you going to be on call for this When does a call at 3am involve an architectural decision or change? It should never come that far.
I agree, if you design it right, which isn't easy.
Five Koans of Software Architecture
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Re: Five Koans of Software Architecture
#12Build it the stupid way first is short sighted imo but this might just be an exaggerated way of saying premature optimisation is wasteful.
Just putting it out there, but I think Knuth’s aphorism is being used and abused to the point that some folk believe system qualities are second to functional requirements when it’s not the case.
Re: Five Koans of Software Architecture
#13I'm probably a bit late on this, but none of these points touched on a software engineer building a complex architecture for no reason. I have seen this so many, many times. Yes, they can handle point #1. They take all the tickets associated with it and solve them quickly because they built it and know all the connections. The implementation makes no attempt (or claim) at scalability so that's a moot point. For point #3, interestingly enough these are never about optimization of anything, but about abstraction over abstraction over abstraction. As for the graph DBs, those aren't allowed anyway by the company they work for (thank goodness) or they would find some way to incorporate them.
Yes, I'm being a bit glib, but over-engineering does not always mean there's some good intentions in there. It can just be really bad.
Re: Five Koans of Software Architecture
#14People in the comments are so quick to be snarky, but this is all really good advice.
Re: Five Koans of Software Architecture
#15> are you going to be on call for this When does a call at 3am involve an architectural decision or change? It should never come that far.
I think, you are misreading it. It isn't about making an architectural design decision / change at 3am, but someone has to live with the consequences of such a design decision and fix something in some way or another at 3am in the morning. I.e. you could go with a clustered db setup which is supposedly HA, or a classical single instance DB... The point here is, whoever has to get up at 3am to fix a potential catastro…
If the architect is also the coder/support, then it's a moot point. But if there is a separate architect, or a pack of them, there's no point in waking them up at 3am. Any architectural change isn't going to be deployed within the hour.
Personally, I think the designers/architects should work on the code too. You have to dogfood your own design, so to speak.
Re: Five Koans of Software Architecture
#16When did “koan” become a synonym for “aphorism”?
I agree. Koan is supposed to be strange mind worm that contradicts your normal experience, sound of one hand clapping sort of thing.
Come to think of it, the AI peeps might be able to make a few. They stay stuff like, does a submarine swim? Pretty close.