category
Software Engineering
- #39 3 min
Product Development is a Trust Fall
A couple weeks ago, Marty Cagan gave an outstanding talk at CraftConf on why products fail despite having great engineering teams. In it, he calls out many of the common mistakes made by teams, and I think there is an underlying theme: trust. Product development is a trust fall. In order to be successful, a chain of trust must be established from the business all the way down to the engineers. If any point in that chain is compromised, the integrity of the product—and specifically its success—is put in jeopardy.
- #37 6 min
Writing Good Code
There’s no shortage of people preaching the importance of good code. Indeed, many make a career of it. The resources available are equally endless, but lately I’ve been wondering how to extract the essence of building high-quality systems into a shorter, more concise narrative. This is actually something I’ve thought about for a while, but I’m just now starting to formulate some ideas into a blog post. The ideas aren’t fully developed, but my hope is to flesh them out further in the future. You can talk about design patterns, abstraction, encapsulation, and cohesion until you’re blue in the face, but what is the essence of good code?
- #35 8 min
If State Is Hell, SOA Is Satan
More and more companies are describing their success stories regarding the switch to a service-oriented architecture. As with any technological upswing, there’s a clear and palpable hype factor involved (Big Data™ or The Cloud™ anyone?), but obviously it’s not just puff. While microservices and SOA have seen a staggering rate of adoption in recent years, the mindset of developers often seems to be stuck in the past. I think this is, at least in part, because we seek a mental model we can reason about. It’s why we build abstractions in the first place. In a sense, I would argue there’s a comparison to be made between the explosion of OOP in the early 90’s and today’s SOA trend. After all, SOA is as much about people scale as it is about workload scale, so it makes sense from an organizational perspective.
- #29 5 min
Not Invented Here
Engineers love engineering things. The reason is self-evident (and maybe self-fulfilling—why else would you be an engineer?). We like to think we’re pretty good at solving problems. Unfortunately, this mindset can, on occasion, yield undesirable consequences which might not be immediately apparent but all the while damaging. Developers are all in tune with the idea of “don’t reinvent the wheel,” but it seems to be eschewed sometimes, deliberately or otherwise. People don’t generally write their own merge sort, so why would they write their own consensus protocol? Anecdotally speaking, they do.
- #28 3 min
Sometimes Kill -9 Isn’t Enough
If there’s one thing to know about distributed systems, it’s that they have to be designed with the expectation of failure. It’s also safe to say that most software these days is, in some form, distributed—whether it’s a database, mobile app, or enterprise SaaS. If you have two different processes talking to each other, you have a distributed system, and it doesn’t matter if those processes are local or intergalactically displaced.