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Amdahl’s Law

2 minute read

Thumbnail image for 'Amdahl’s Law' Gene Amdal in 1976 Business software is generally used to optimise processes so that they run faster. Competitive advantage for companies can come from doing the boring stuff better as well as doing the new things other companies don’t do. But if we look at a process end-to-end it can rarely be optimised all the way through. Often what we find is that parts of the process cause disproportionate delays and so we focus on those. Other t...

Space-based Archetypes

8 minute read

This is the third of three articles on the space-based architecture. The first was a general introduction, and description of a commercially deployed example, the second looked at how the SBA supports Agile because of its complimentary nature to how businesses think and work, and this final episode looks at some of the subtle technicalities of the SBA. Before I start, let me make clear my relationship with the SBA - I am not connected in any way with Gigaspaces (the originators of the formal...

Space-based Agility

6 minute read

A related post on space-based architecture was published a couple of weeks ago. It was going to be a one-off but I was at the inaugural Gigaspaces User Group in London recently, and a couple of things occurred to me between presentations that I thought worth mentioning. So there are two extra articles to come (this is the first). Perhaps it’s not a conventional place to start, but the idea for linking spaces and agility occurred to me because I am having a bathroom remodelled at the moment (b...

Space-based Architecture

9 minute read

This is the short version of the story of my experience with Space-based Architecture. Being the instigator for one of the most often referred-to commercial implementations of an SBA and unusually an implementation outside of the financial trading sector, where the approach is more mainstream, it’s appropriate that I cover not just its implementation, but why it seemed like a good idea in the first place. I was Head of Architecture & Design at Virgin Mobile in the UK until shortly after ...

The Little Language

7 minute read

I’ve talked quite a bit about domain-specific languages (DSL) in other articles, and I freely admit that I am very excited about the concept at the moment, but I’ve not found much on the web that really gets to the nub of why they might be important to the future of software development. There’s a pretty good article in the Linux Journal and Martin Fowler’s post covers the basics, but nearly all the others whiz through the subject, saying little more than Yacc and VBA in Excel, are good enou...