Things Every Software Architect Should Know • Hacker News Board

edu wrote: post #2

I stopped reading after One line of working code is worth 500 of specification and It's never too early to think about performance . I thought this philosophy was proven flawed!

There is a difference between things that an architect needs to worry about and the things a developer needs to worry about.

That difference is due to scale - the architect has to think about the application holistically where a developer needs to think atomically.

Re: Things Every Software Architect Should Know

#15

Post by kailashbadu » Wed, Feb 18, 2009, 6:06 PM UTC

swombat wrote: post #5

There are no such thing as "best practices". What's "best" always depends on circumstances. As such, this is perhaps useful as a list of advice to software architects (basically senior senior developers, in my experience), but only with a huge disclaimer that you must figure out for yourself which bits to apply in your current circumstances . Why is that disclaimer always missing from list of best practices, even whe…

Agreed.

The key is to avoid slavishly following a rule. You should not shy away from breaking a rule, provided you have good reasons for the violation. First learn what the good rules are (as applicable in majority of cases) and then learn when to break them. The best practices are not supposed to be carried over verbatim into every development project.