Software is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996. The Great Software Stagnation
The gap is widening, and there is no easy path to catch up. It's not for lack of technology, so there is no magic solution to buy. The necessary competence resides in product companies, so consultants is not the solution
We need to find new ways to collaborate. We are trying one
Few High Performers, widening Gap?
I agree with new ways to collaborate. Organizational boundaries are getting blurred between "Public" & "Private" spaces & imperative considering Complexity and Cognitive Load, Open Source, Deployment of Workloads to Public Cloud & "Edge".
- Organization
"Funding was stable, the way that Bell Labs was funded was that a very small tax was applied to any time you made a phone call in the United States a tiny slice of the money involved would go to Bell Labs to improve future telephone service and so that helped that meant that you could count on having revenue to support research for a long time , the organization was very stable , people stayed there for many many years & the company itself took an exceptionally broad and long-term view the job was to improve communication systems and that’s going to be a problem for a long time so almost anything you wanted to work on was arguably relevant to building better telephone systems and so that meant the company was not run by the quarter of a year it was run by multi-year period and all of this led to an environment which is also very cooperative and just plain fun. People enjoyed being there.."
-- Brian Kernighan Unix: History and Memoir (Chapter 9 is Legacy -> Technical, Organization, Recognition, Could history repeat?)
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About
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Roadmap
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Architecture
-- Open Source & Community / Kelsey Hightower, Developer & Open Source Advocate, Google Cloud
- Security, Privacy, Observability & Ethics etc.
- Complexity & Cognitive Work / "Workload"
- Applications
Interoperability with Open APIs.
- Amazons, Banking, Healthcare, IoT, ... / Cloud, ...
"We start by looking at which “-ilities” are most important to architects. A software architect is responsible for the cross-cutting concerns and making sure that individual components of a large system can work together seamlessly to meet overall objectives. In 2021, four areas we feel architects are concerned with are designing for resilience, designing for observability, designing for portability, and designing for sustainability."
-- https://www.infoq.com/articles/architecture-trends-2021/
-- From book Implementing Service Level Objectives
"if building a software-intensive system, these are the forces we must weigh" https://twitter.com/ruthmalan/status/989206552044294145
- On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
- Revisiting Information Hiding
- The theory of graceful extensibility
"culture is not a static ‘thing’ but something which everyone is constantly creating, affirming and expressing" -- Mary Douglas
Companies & Culture: What You Do Is Who You Are - a16z editor in chief Sonal Chokshi interviews a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz -- author of the book What You Do Is > Who You Are -- on whether companies and people can change; how the very thing that is your strength can also be your weakness; how startups evolve from pirates to > the navy; actions vs words and values; and more.
I am reading a book that was recommended by Kumar, Anil called "Accelerate - Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim". I am about 100 pages in and finally starting to understand the vision around our "destination" culture and honestly the "different cultures" that exist among our divisions.
On pg30 the book describes 3 types of organizational cultures.
- Pathological (power oriented) organizations are characterized by large amounts of fear and threat. People often hoard information or withhold it for political reasons, or distort it to make themselves look better.
- Bureaucratic (rule-oriented) organizations protect departments. Those in the department want to maintain their "turf", insist on their own rules, and generally do things by the book - their book.
- Generative (performance-oriented) organizations focus on the mission. How do we accomplish our goal? Everything is subordinated to good performance, to doing what we are supposed to do.
Moving forward in the book I'm learning about changes that need to be made around testing, version control, automation, CICD, communication, etc... I am starting to be able to tie ideas that are nicely articulated in the book to statements I've heard in meetings by folks like Kumar, Anil, Raghavendra, Vijay, and Charlton, Paul. Wow. This is so cool... It's like a giant light bulb turned on this week!
I believe our destination culture is Generative. I also feel that "we all kinda want it". So, I'm getting excited about what the future holds...
I recommend that all Tech managers & Architects get a copy of this book and read through it.
Scaling engineering team Back then Backyard at Yahoo!, Now Backstage open source project Incubated by Spotify, Adopted as Runway@American Airlines,
Likely termed "Internal Platforms" @Hundreds of organizations ...
"There's a lot of hype around developer productivity platforms..." -- https://twitter.com/martinfowler/status/1387041315196702720
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent