February 2009
Beginner
222 pages
5h 23m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
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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.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.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.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.
Chapter 77. Stable Problems Get High-Quality Solutions
After a lifetime of playing with computers—starting with writing games in BASIC on the BBC computer and going on to such diverse elements as pascal, Mathematica, and using Labview to process hand-rolled databases made of raw text data files from experiments held together with sticky tape—Sam Gardiner stumbled into professional software development. He has been working in the software industry for six years.
—Sam Gardiner
REAL-WORLD PROGRAMMING is not about solving the problem that someone gives to you. In the computer science classroom, you must solve the binary-sort problem given to you. In the real world, the best architects don't solve hard problems, they work around them. The skill is in drawing boundaries around diffuse and diverse software problems so that they are stable and self-contained.
An architect should be able to look at a whole mess of concepts and data and process and separate them into smaller pieces or "chunks." The important thing about those problem chunks is that they are stable, allowing them to be solved by a system chunk that is finite and stable in scope. The problem chunks should be:
Internally cohesive: the chunk is conceptually unified, so all of the tasks, data, and features are related
Well separated from other chunks: the chunks are conceptually normalized; there is little or no overlap between them ...
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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.