The Definition Of Insanity

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again” - this quote attributed to Einstein warns us of the danger of magical thinking, hoping that trying something just one more time will achieve success when before we failed. But is this really insanity? In this talk, I’ll argue that retrying things actually does make a lot of sense, and is in fact key to improving the resilience of a distributed system. Along the way, I’ll explain the importance of timeouts, retry limits and knowing when giving up does make sense. I’ll also show how retries can be made safe (and help avoid draining your bank account), and perhaps we’ll get to examine that Einstein quote in a bit more detail…

Architecture Disributed Systems Video

 Design Discovery In Existing Systems

We all want the best design but often that is not directly obtainable. Our tools for understanding systems behaviour may lead us to the abstractions we would want to use in a rewrite but what about the abstractions that exist in the system now? Do they matter? What about the structure? Are there unnamed concepts we can see through the current cohesion and coupling in the system that will help us get to where we need to go? In this talk, Michael Feathers will describe cases where being aware of what currently exists leads to better solutions. We can often leverage what we have instead of building up a domain from a greenfield.

Abstraction Design Systems Video

 Evolution of software architecture

Welcome to The Pragmatic Engineer! Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Grady Booch, a true legend in software development. Grady is the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM, where he leads groundbreaking research in embodied cognition. He’s the mind behind several object-oriented design concepts, a co-author of the Unified Modeling Language, and a founding member of the Agile Alliance and the Hillside Group. Grady has authored six books, hundreds of articles, and holds prestigious titles as an IBM, ACM, and IEEE Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Lovelace Medal (an award for those with outstanding contributions to the advancement of computing). In this episode, we discuss: • What it means to be an IBM Fellow • The evolution of the field of software development • How UML was created, what its goals were, and why Grady disagrees with the direction of later versions of UML • Pivotal moments in software development history • How the software architect role changed over the last 50 years • Why Grady declined to be the Chief Architect of Microsoft – saying no to Bill Gates! • Grady’s take on large language models (LLMs) • Advice to less experienced software engineers • … and much more!

Architecture Philosophy Video

 Complexity Basics — Part II: Types of Systems

Abstraction Philosophy Systems

 Shades of Conway's Law

In short, Conway's Law says any organisation that designs a system will come up with a system design that copies the organisational communication structures. Over the years, many individuals rephrased Conway's Law in various ways. Every paraphrase brings new insights and non-negligible consequences. Sometimes they give the impression of contradicting each other. However, in the end, they all come to the same conclusion. The organisation and the system keep each other in balance. Modifying the organisation will have an impact on the system. Modifying the system will have an impact on the organisation. Not considering that will cause friction in the organisation or the system with dramatic consequences. To be competitive as an organisation in the market, and to effectively design the right thing our customers expect us to deliver, we'd better understand and take advantage of this. About Thierry de Pauw: Thierry is a lean IT Engineer at the fintech startup Abbove. On the side, he founded ThinkingLabs, an advisory firm for optimising IT delivery while reducing stress, burnout and fatigue. From time to time he is asked to conduct technology due diligence for investors to review the technology capabilities of organisations. Thierry is a CI/CD advocate and jack-of-all-trades. Instead of balancing quality & delivery, he believes and practices that better quality is actually a way to more and better deliveries.

Conway's Law Design Video

 Visual Agility: Why We Model

Design of complex systems is hard -- wickedly hard! It takes all the cognitive assist we can muster. Trade-offs must be made because there is interaction -- not just interaction among components to create a capability, but interaction among properties. And interaction between the system and its users and containing systems(-of-systems). And more! These systems are evolving -- the more agile, the more we try to take this co-evolution, this learning across boundaries, this symmathesy, into account.

Abstraction Design

 The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction

One of the most useful things I learned in all this was that many of the things we were building had a very simple concept at their heart: the log. Sometimes called write-ahead logs or commit logs or transaction logs, logs have been around almost as long as computers and are at the heart of many distributed data systems and real-time application architectures.

Disributed Systems Event Sourcing Software Engineering

 A Distributed Systems Reading List

This document contains various resources and quick definition of a lot of background information behind distributed systems. It is not complete, even though it is kinda sorta detailed. I had written it some time in 2019 when coworkers at the time had asked for a list of references, and I put together what I thought was a decent overview of the basics of distributed systems literature and concepts.

Disributed Systems

 A Philosophical Look at System Dynamics

Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, Spring of 1977. In this lecture, Donella Meadows takes on a more philosophical concept. How can we bring ourselves to be aware of the assumptions we make as systems thinkers? She asserts that models are a set of assumptions. Donella Meadows defines some of these system dynamics assumptions (such as causal relationships and feedback loops) in this video.

Abstraction Philosophy Video

 So you think you want to write a deterministic hypervisor?

What is a deterministic hypervisor and why do we need one anyhow?

Testing