I doubt there has ever been a time when software architecture was seen as a raging success. The “three-tier architecture” of the web has held up extremely well and is an excellent place for many people to start. The “12 Factor App” approach has encouraged developers to adopt practices that make deployment and scaling much simpler. Over the last couple of years, though, I’ve noticed developers advocating for architectures I consider to be extreme and limited in utility, foisting highly complex systems into startup environments at great cost. It appears to me to be getting worse.
RedMonk published a great article today on the incompleteness of technical debt as a metaphor. This touches on a number of points, the best one I think is that for many people in business, debt just isn’t a “bad per se” thing. Technical debt, more often than not, is.
I completely agree with the analysis. Presenting technical debt as risk is a more accurate picture a lot of the time. While it’s potentially even more accurate to relate them to other financial instruments (my favourite is the “uncollateralized technical debt obligation”), it’s much more difficult to relate to.
I’d like to share the simile I use.
Millions of words are expended on software architecture. Fashions come and go; some patterns last a long time, others are a flash in the pan. One day, Model-View-Controller is all the rage. The next, it’s Model-View-ViewModel. So on and so forth – the next new architecture is the One True Way or a genuine silver bullet, until it’s not, at which point it’s legacy, technical debt or code smell.
Developers talk too much about architecture. In the future tense, it’s always what the next architecture is going to enable them to do, what problems it will solve. In the past tense, it’s usually about what the architecture prevents them doing, why the architect was bad, why it’s the wrong pattern, etc. Static architecture design is the wrong thing to think about, and here’s why.
Last week I gave a lightning talk, ostensibly on Kubernetes / docker / prometheus, to a motley crew of London CTOs. I rarely give talks these days, so of course I ran over massively. There’s so much I’ve learned, and my teams have learned, attempting to force a discussion like this into a lightning format feels trite (in retrospect).
There’s a key reason for this. In my talk, I called it the “Cambrian explosion period of Ops”: there are a multitude of tools available, more are being developed all the time, and there’s a huge amount of overlap.
I don’t want to try to predict when we’re going to hit “peak Ops tools”. Serverless is a way off from hitting most mainstream teams yet; it’s still a novelty right now, will grow very quickly around 2020 and will probably be dominant by 2025. So, we can’t be that far off the peak – and another sign of this is that we’re beginning to see real consolidation.
I wrote a couple of times previously about Symfony 4, particularly the architecture and use of Makefiles. It’s now at the point of being testable, so I took it for a short spin.
One comment for Linux users: your operating system will probably need an upgrade. I’m a Fedora user, and the stable release only includes PHP 7.0. Although that’s recent, it’s not good enough. Thankfully Fedora 26 has been in alpha a little while, and the beta is due at the end of this month. It was an easy upgrade, and includes PHP 7.1.4, a new enough version.
It’s interesting watching history repeat itself. There are a number of fashions that come and go in technology: thin client computing comes back every twenty years or so, for example. In the 80s, Unix was very big – it faded a bit in the nineties but then came roaring back with Linux.
Another venerable bit of software is coming back into fashion – good old Make. It’s not the perfect tool by any means, and the niche it once had is no longer that relevant. However, I think we’re going to see a growth in its usage once again. Let me explain why.
People sometimes ask me about the structure of our internal development team, and to what extent we’re truly “agile”. My response is that we’re actually more “lean”. I happily give examples of some of the key working practices we have. I generally don’t explain the difference between “lean” and “agile”, though.
Sometimes, people use these terms interchangeably. I think this is wrong, but understandable. As a JIRA user, I’m used to it offering a Kanban board to run a scrum sprint. This can be a great choice, but it muddies the waters. Let me take this opportunity to explain my thinking then!
Coming up with convincing vision and mission in a corporate environment is never easy – in fact, I think it’s one of the most difficult things you can do. Setting a clear and crisp vision is crucial to create an aligned organisation. Refining down into an elevator-pitch sized statement while avoiding generalisations, platitudes and (frankly) abstract jibberish is practically impossible.
Doing so outside a corporate environment I think is even more difficult – money is at least a straightforward motivation to hang a hat on. One of the best guides to doing this is Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start Manifesto, I particularly like the bit about making mantra.
Explaining Serverless technology
If you’re an IT or business leader, you’ve probably heard about serverless. Forward-thinking organisations are planning for servless now, because it’s a big change to how we build software. You don’t need deep tech knowledge to understand why – there’s nothing mystical about serverless. I’m going to explain what this is in simple terms and how it will affect software development practices.
It was only just over a week ago that I posted about brand being the net result of action, and in the last few days United Airlines have decided to furnish me with the best example yet.
There’s nothing that speaks more volumes than how a company treats its customers, and while it’s not the case that all their customers are treated this poorly, the fact they will go this low is shocking.
