Resources

 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

 Designing Fault-Tolerant Software with Control System Transparency

GN&C Fault Protection Fundamentals by Robert Rasmussen, who works for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is an organization that works closely with NASA on designing spacecraft. GN&C is guidance, navigation, and control. These are the main software systems here. This paper actually distills a ton of experience spent with really thinking through how to build really fault tolerant systems into some core principles.

Architecture Disributed Systems Video

 Design Principles Behind Smalltalk

The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone. Our work flows from a vision that includes a creative individual and the best computing hardware available. We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming language) that serves as an interface between the models in the human mind and those in computing hardware, and a language of interaction (user interface) that matches the human communication system to that of the computer. Our work has followed a two- to four-year cycle that can be seen to parallel the scientific method: Build an application program within the current system (make an observation) Based on that experience, redesign the language (formulate a theory) Build a new system based on the new design (make a prediction that can be tested) The Smalltalk-80 system marks our fifth time through this cycle. In this article, I present some of the general principles we have observed in the course of our work. While the presentation frequently touches on Smalltalk "motherhood", the principles themselves are more general and should prove useful in evaluating other systems and in guiding future work.

Design OOP Philosophy