"software architecture" entries
Software engineers must continuously learn and integrate
Four ways programmers can thrive in their careers.
As O’Reilly continues to build and assess our programming content ecosystem — now more than 30 years in the making — we have gone from covering a few key languages, operating systems, and concepts to a diversification of topics that would have made an editor’s head spin in the 1980s. Our goal, however, remains the same: to continue to provide practical content from experts who help you do your job. An important piece of that goal is to keep you informed as we interpret the trends on the horizon. What follows are a few of the core themes we are focusing on at the moment. Expect these to evolve and change with the speed of innovation.
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Actually be a software engineer
The term “full-stack” first emerged in a 2008 blog post (the original post is no longer available, but an archive is published here). The term perhaps reached its canonical definition in a post by Facebook engineer Carlos Bueno. He wrote:
“A ‘full-stack programmer’ is a generalist, someone who can create a non-trivial application by themselves. People who develop broad skills also tend to develop a good mental model of how different layers of a system behave.“
Whether you are striving to be a full-stack programmer, a T-shaped engineer, or you choose to rebuff those terms entirely as mere marketing, what now floats around as a “full-stack developer” definition is incomplete. Read more…
Elvis has left the ivory tower
Pragmatism now rules in team structure, technology, engineering practices, and operational innovation.
Ancient history in computer science (2004) provides a gem about the personas that Microsoft envisioned as users of the development environment Visual Studio. They developed three:
- Mort, the opportunistic developer, likes to create quick-working solutions for immediate problems. He focuses on productivity and learns as needed.
- Elvis, the pragmatic programmer, likes to create long-lasting solutions addressing the problem domain, and learning while working on the solution.
- Einstein, the paranoid programmer, likes to create the most efficient solution to a given problem and typically learns in advance before working on the solution.
These designations received a lot of negative press, particularly around the Mort persona, but I want to focus on Einstein and Elvis.
Formerly, software architects exemplified the Einstein persona: isolated from day-to-day development details, focused on building abstractions and frameworks. The isolation is so common that it spawned its own “Ivory Tower Architect” derogatory phrase. But the realities of building systems that scale as fast as the business does invalidates that approach. Now, Elvis, the pragmatic developer, has ascended to architect while simultaneously descending from the Ivory Tower. Modern architects don’t have the luxury of isolation from the gritty realities of software development today. Pragmatism now rules in team structure, technology, engineering practices, and operational innovation because: