Month: March 2009

  • Strategic Design- The good, the bad and the ugly

    Not all of a large system will be well designed and this can pull your attention in multiple directions.  The goal is to have the most important part s of the system well designed – strategic design. Take two loosely coupled systems that have grown independently, but are starting to move toward interaction.  The decision…

  • Phases in a developers life

    Phases in a developers life Enthusiastic –  build programs for real people – but its boring and uncool The disillusioned developer – you figure real people have boring problems Build generic solutions there cool, become an enthusiastic architect – build the generic thing machine But that takes loads of time and everyone else is still…

  • A story about a technical architect – Pimp my architecture

    A great architect will: be a coach be an expert – have instinct be an influencer have the ability to understand what’s in place and tell stories about it have empathy to understand what is true for others not just self have humility and humor have technological and social curiosity Prologue An architect often turns…

  • When is open source and standardization right?

    Standardization is essential for certain parts of the stack, those items that change least frequently i.e lower in the stack. Higher in the stack needs to change frequently and here standardization kills innovation.  We need to remember it take a lot of time to get to a standard and also Open Source will always be…

  • The evolving Guardian.co.uk architecture

    What were the challenges faced and how they were overcome. Digital History 1995 – web site launched with a simple portal – experimental project 2006 – Europe largest online newspaper site 2007 – aim to be the worlds leading liberal voice But by 2007 had outgrown there existing vingnette architecture. So entered a 18month re-design.…

  • Transforming Software Architecture with Web as Platform

    Focus on the power of people and today’s network opportunity.  Your customers, competitors and all the ideas and innovation is on the network.  There is very few things the browser cannot do, but its still not a great place to develop software.  however, its much bigger that any operating system. Now we are seeing that…

  • Situation normal, everything must change – How IT is changing with the advent of cloud computing

    How IT is changing with the advent of cloud computing. Why IT is changing Not all IT is the same, not all IT has value as some had commoditised. This occurred through the warfare of technological advantage and copycatting.  Anything new is a chance of competitive advantage anything common is a service. Follows the same…

  • Cloud Data Persistence

    is this a renaissance for the database? today we have new problems and new challenges, but the computing power we now have provides alternatives.  This in turn is changing the approaches that are being taken. the following provides examples of the alternatives in the cloud database area. Physical limitations and computation complexity are driving implementations…

  • Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA)

    WOA is an emergent phenomenon across Start-ups and the Enterprise. Top level history of development: Structured Object Oriented Service Oriented – turn applications into open platforms SOAP, WSDL etc Web Oriented – address the failings in service oriented inability to deal with legal, technical, security and other business issues.  REST SOAP is stable or shrinking,…

  • The Web Platform

    Presented by two of my favorite speakers Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith and they were as good as ever.  i lost my notes, but this is what i remembered without seeing the slides again. Mozilla concept series – future of the browser, the sci-fiction.  But what is really happening to the browser.  Started with Netscape…