I get to deal with a lot of developers and a lot of different teams being an architect (yeah, I just run around like a headless chicken). There is one thing that I have been noticing over the years and that’s what this is about. Great teams and good developers create what is required for a task/story and nothing more. That doesn’t mean they just put some random shit together. No, they create simple thing with high quality.

At my current gig we are working hard on splitting up an old monolith which is the wart of the our business. This work is time consuming and it takes a long time. Why not write a new system and make a switch once it’s complete? This question gets asked a lot by people who come to our company and by various stakeholders. They are frustrated by the fact that breaking up “the pile of mud” takes a lot of time and effort.

what’s in a name? In my experience pretty much everything is in the name when it comes to the art of programming. If you start out with bad naming and a structure which does not communicate any of your intentions with writing the code you will end up having problems. Either understanding it yourself or having anyone else make sense of your code. When I do code reviews I often only get to this part.

A pragmatic approach means taking your surroundings into account when creating new buildings I watched this program about an architecture collective in Denmark called Adept (or something). They had “a pragmatic approach” towards architecture. What they meant was that if you where to build a new house in the midst of some ugly piece of urban sprawl you shouldn’t design something totally spaced out, but instead realize that the ugliness around you is going to be there for a while and you should take it into consideration in your project.