In November 2007, Bruce Eckel gave a commencement address at Neumont College of Computer Science in Salt Lake City. He published it shortly after and titled it “The Mythical 5%.” It’s a good speech about what it takes to be a member of the top 5% of software engineers in the world who are 20x more productiv...
Last time I talked about the origins of the architecture of the modern web and how it is what it is because people like Tim Berners-Lee and Roy Fielding radically decomposed the problem space into its stable, long-living, constituent parts. These parts are the constraining buildin...
In late 2011, I was asked to talk at a conference on digital trends. I didn’t have anything prepared so hastily suggested the topic “100-Year Architecture,” thinking that sounded clickbaity enough to get people to show up and I could fill in the blanks later. I did though have one thought in m...
A lot of businesses say they want to be ‘digital.’ And I think when they say that they mean two things:
(A) they want to create an end-to-end suite of slick apps for their customers to enable them to self-serve, have a great experience, develop some love for the brand
(B) they want a delivery capability to m...
Risk is a funny thing. We let it influence so much of what we do and yet we barely understand what it is. For example, we might choose not to build a particular product, or add a new feature, because “it’s too high risk” (and yet we laud start-ups who did it anyway). We hold very long meetings to create plan...