erik dörnenburg » Clippings

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

Erik Doernenburg — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:48:41 +0000

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.

Guardian podcast

Erik Doernenburg — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:28:12 +0000

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.

The ThoughtWorks Anthology

Erik Doernenburg — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:12:19 +0000

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.

Interview on Software Visualisation

Erik Doernenburg — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 02:28:21 +0000

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.

Agile and Open Source

Erik Doernenburg — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 16:36:08 +0000

I’m completely convinced that development processes following the ideas outlined in the Agile Manifesto have helped us tremendously when delivering software for our clients at ThoughtWorks. (You noticed that I didn’t just say “Agile processes”; this term has become overloaded to the point of being almost meaningless. It’s good to go back to first principles.) At the same time I’m involved with a few Open Source projects.

So, what’s in the intersection of these two topics? The answer is in an article that has been published in this month’s issue of Linux User.

I know this is not available freely and I will make this article available online soon.

What we think about SOA

Erik Doernenburg — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 09:48:58 +0000

Ian Cartwright and I had many many discusions about SOA, what it means for us, for the industry, whether it’s something revolutionary or just a rebranding excercise.

We finally managed to get our thoughts together and wrote and article that just appeared in the Business IT Interface section of the British Computing Society’s site.

Read the full article here.