February 2009
Beginner
222 pages
5h 23m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
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Chapter 2. Simplify Essential Complexity; Diminish Accidental Complexity
Neal Ford is a software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is the designer/developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, and video/DVD presentations, and he is author and/or editor of five books. He also speaks at lots of conferences. You can assuage your ravenous curiosity about Neal at http://www.nealford.com.
—Neal Ford
ESSENTIAL COMPLEXITY REPRESENTS the difficulty inherent in any problem. For example, coordinating a nation's air traffic is an inherently complex problem. Every plane's exact position (including altitude), speed, direction, and destination must be tracked in real time to prevent mid-air and runway collisions. The flight schedules of aircraft must be managed to avoid airport congestion in a continuously changing environment—a severe change in weather throws the entire schedule out of whack.
Conversely, accidental complexity grows from the things we feel we must build to mitigate essential complexity. The antiquated air traffic control system used today is an example of accidental complexity. It was designed to address the essential complexity of controlling the traffic of thousands of airplanes, but the solution itself introduces its own complexity.In ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.