Coding the Architecture - architecture tag

How much architecture is enough?

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:01:00 GMT

Thanks to everybody that came along to our "in *our* brains" session last week where we tried to answer the question of how much architecture is enough. The event was part of Skills Matter's London Agile Month and it was a great turnout where we had some interesting disucssion ranging from what agile is all about through to how architecture tasks should be tackled during an agile project.

The set of slides that I used to set the scene can be downloaded from here (PDF, 0.9MB) and the video from the session can be watched from here (this includes the presentation and the discussion). Also, Alberto Brandolini has a really good blog entry, which covers the session along with some of his own thoughts that followed. See you next month!

Discussion from the May 2008 user group

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 06:57:27 GMT

Although this happened a few months ago, we recorded the discussion that followed our London user group where Moudud Ahmed talked about building a high volume, low latency system in Java. Here are some of the topics that we talked about.

Performance and scalability.
Measuring latency.
Domain-driven design.
BEA's real-time Java platform.
Writing applications with large heap sizes that can survive not doing garbage collection during the working day.

The audio levels are very low on the recording, but we think that the interesting discussion was worth rescuing and publishing. You can grab the discussion from here (mp3 format) ... just don't listen on a tube train! If you missed the user group, a streaming video of the presentation is also available.

Mind the gap

Fri, 02 May 2008 10:58:03 GMT

Our industry has a love/hate relationship with the software architect role, with many organisations dismissing it because of their negative experiences of architects that dictate from "ivory towers" and aren't engaged with the actual task of building working software. This reputation is damaging the IT industry and inhibiting project success. Things need to change. This essay looks at the gap between software developers and software architects, offering some suggestions on how to reduce this gap and ensure projects are driven to a successful conclusion.

Read the full essay in our book.