Three years ago, unhappy with Apple’s hardware lineup, I decided to dip my toes into the Hackintosh world. It was a resounding success and the machine I built back then has served me well. So, last month, with Intel’s Ivy Bridge and Apple’s Mountain Lion out, I decided to build another Hackintosh. I have written up my experience in this article.

Admittedly, I’ve been struggling with the “Architect” title in the IT world. It is not that I think there’s no role for architecture, far from it, but too often I’ve encountered architects who focus too narrowly on architecture, losing track of the realities of actual software development and the context in which the software will be used. I wonder, if there was no “Architect” title and people who are responsible for architecture would be called guide or coach or tech lead, or just the senior developer, whether things would be better.

About a year ago, in a discussion about architects, rather than trying to define what an architect is or does, we looked at what he or she should know. We expressed our ideas as mini-essays, strictly limiting ourselves to one per essay, and it turned out that, at least to my surprise, there was a lot of agreement; maybe because we hadn’t come up with hard and fast rules but with ideas and guidelines.

Luckily Richard Monson-Haefel was part of that discussion and he had the resolve and means to make our thoughts more widely available. Our list of the 97 things every architect should know was collected and refined on this wiki, and is available under a creative commons license. For a more convenient read it has now also been published as a book by O’Reilly. As expected, the discussions have begun.

Of the many projects I have worked on the rewrite of the Guardian website is certainly a highlight. And in this case I can even speak about it in detail. In fact, Mat Wall from the Guardian and I presented some of our experiences at several conferences, and now the Software Engineering Radio has published a podcast in which we talk about this project.

It has been in the making for some time but now the ThoughtWorks Anthology is available from the Pragmatic Programmers. The Anthology is a collection of essays written by individual authors from ThoughtWorks covering a wide range of topics that we encounter on our projects. My essay finally gets our thinking on Domain Annotations into writing, after we had presented the ideas at a couple of conferences. A more in-depth description of the Anthology can be found on the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

I have looked at applications of visualisations techniques to improve software quality for good while now, and at a QCon conference earlier this year Floyd Marinescu and I chatted about my current thinking. If you are interested, the full interview has been published on InfoQ now. More here.