97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

Chapter 33. Time Changes Everything

Philip Nelson is a technology generalist whose career began in hardware; moved to networks, systems, and administration; and finally changed to software development and architecture, where he found the most interesting things were going on. He has worked on software problems in transportation, finance, manufacturing, marketing, and many infrastructure-related areas.

—Philip Nelson

ONE OF THE THINGS I've been most entertained by as the years have gone by is observing what things have lasted and what haven't. So many patterns, frameworks, paradigm changes, and algorithms—all argued for with passion by smart people, thinking of the long term, balancing all the known issues—have not warranted more than a yawn over the long haul. Why? What is history trying to tell us?

Pick a Worthy Challenge

This one is tricky for a software architect. Challenges or problems are given to us, so we don't have the luxury of choosing, right? It's not that simple. First of all, we often make the mistake of believing that we can't influence what we are asked to do. Usually we can, but it gets us out of our comfort zone in the technology space. There are dragons there when we don't choose to do the right things. Time passes, we have worked diligently and hard solving the requested challenge, and in the end it doesn't matter: we didn't do what was really needed and our work is ...