Speaker: Neal Ford from thoughtworks
@neal4d
Link to table of contents
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Were architectures come from
- Architecture is reactive
- Someone starts doing something, then others do
- Once a bunch doing, named (after the fact)
- Reflection on how doing software development at the time
- Once in an architecture, can watch how it grows and changes
Eras
- Victorian – 1801-1900 – science, cassifying natural world
- Modernism – 1890-1945 – industriial revolution, explosive growth of cities, abstract art, radio.
- Post-modernism – 1946-1990 – push back about modernism, irony, questioning everything, television, Seinfield’s ”never hug, never learn”
- Post-post modernism or metamodernism – 1990-present – internet
- Naming things is hard. Not just in software. Modernism is bad choice of name because what would come next
Metamodern
- In 1989, to find out Chicago weather would need to watch Weather Channel and wait for it to cycle around or go to library. Now pull it up onlie.
- In 1989, could read a few books and know pretty much everything about wine. Now too much info and keep generating more.
- Holism – view various systems as whole
- Parks and recreating is first meta-modern show
- Breaking bad – colo driven – yellow is safe and purple is bad
- Return to sentimentaliitiy. Can’t live on ironism alone
Software architecture
- microservices – one of most popular pages on Martin Fowler’s website. Say what it is and more importantly, what it isn’t.
- First law of software architecture: ”Everything in software architecture is a tradeoff”. If you haven’t encountered yet, will be in the future
- Reuse reduces complexity but comes with high coupling
- Metamodern software architect needs to do tradeoff analysis. Ex: things that change slowly are good for reuse such as frameworks and OS
- service mesh and sidecar pattern – orthogonal coupling
Books
- ”Fundamentals of Software Architecture”
- ”Software Architecture: the Hard Parts”
- ”Data Mesh”
Forces
- Consistency – atoic, eventual
- Communication – sync, asych
- Coordination – orchestrated, choreography
- 8 possiblities by choosing one of each. ex: one is a monolith. All 8 can exist as pattern or antipattern.
- Named them transactional sagas. epic, fantasy fiction, fairy tale, parallel, phone tag, horror story time travel, anthology
Richard Feinman
- Computers used to be a room full of people (usually women) calculating things
- Feyman added specialization and paralleliation. Some people are better at some tasks than others. And recovering from problems
- 1945 – atomic bomb blast is what shifted eras
- reonsider why continuing to do thing. revisit when reasons change
Internet
- Pushed us to net era
- Volkswagon used software to cheat on emissions test. Some people knew actively working to break the law
- Facebook keeps getting busted for doing bad thigs – data breaches, illegally tracking users, Cambridge Analytica, using two factor for marketing.
- Last week, Facebook made up a meme that TikTok that students slapping teachers. Then it became a self fulling prophacy
Finance and ethics
- Modernism – double enry accounting
- Post-modern – quants
- Metamodern humane corporation, ethics. Recognize all connected to each other
- Don’t want to create something cool and spening rest of career on appology tour
- Apple, Google employees pushed back
My take
Fun start to the day. I hadn’t heard of the ”saga” approach before. Googling, at least some of them see to be a real thing. (and all are from ”the hard parts” book I also increased my book reading list. The end felt rushed. Maybe because started late?
