During my recent vacation I was reflecting on patterns I observe in my 15+ tenure in a corporate SW engineering environment. My friends and colleagues know me to be very interested in the meta-level of organizational dynamics, my blog is evidence for this.
Its not so easy (for me) to communicate such patterns in a thought-provoking manner. The internet and software culture offers a very rich collection of much more clever people’s takes. You probably have heard about Murphy’s Law, Conway’s Law, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. https://matthewreinbold.com/2020/08/03/Technology-Aphorisms has a nice collection of those. However, phrasing laws is a but too much for my humble self. Instead, I figured aphorisms are more apprioriate for my opinions. However, I have to admit that I cant perfectly differentiate between aphorism, sententia, maxim, Aperçu, and bonmot. I guess this is just me trying to be clever, too 🙂
In task forces you bring together end-to-end teams and miraculously it works. Why do you wait for the task force to form such teams?
Great organizations mature and evolve their software over many years. Others replace it every other year – and call this progress.
While the strategy grows on shiny slides, the engineers wonder who still listens to them.
In a world of infinite content, silence becomes signal
It’s not the traffic that breaks the system — it’s the architect’s fantasy of it.
In the world of junior architects, no problem is too small for an oversized solution.
Overengineering doesn’t solve problems — it staffs them.
Complexity is job security — for the team that caused it.
Not every repetition is a problem. Some abstractions are worse.
YAGNI is no excuse for architecture – but a compass for its necessity
Every new DSL saves you five keystrokes – and costs you 3 days of debugging