Software Architecture

22 articles · all categories

8 articles from 2024 · show all

December 2024

Empirical evidence for code modularity

Few of your engineering decisions matter long-term. Software is soft. You can change your mind. But how you structure your components is here to stay.

November 2024

Big Ball of Mud – the world's most popular software architecture

Forget Gang of Four, here are the 7 architectural patterns real programmers use:

September 2024

The Laws of Software Evolution

Manny Lehman was one of the first to notice that software is never done. It just continues to evolve forever.

Why software projects fail

5 common themes

July 2024

DRY – the common source of bad abstractions

Swizec reveals the hidden pitfalls of overusing the DRY principle in coding, leading to bad abstractions. Discover how to write adaptable, efficient code that avoids these common traps.

Scaling Fast, my talk on lessons from tech startups

This talk from C3Fest summarizes the key lessons I've learned in the past ~15 years of working in tech startups. It's a high level overview of a new book I'm writing (60% done).

You can't side-quest a product

Here's a trap that talented engineers fall into all the time. It creates frustration, burnout, and the genre of tweets that read like "Why don't people care about the amazing work I'm doing".

March 2024

Architecture is like a path in the woods

You're doing too much. Sit back, relax, see how people *want* to use the code. THEN build the abstraction.