February 2009
Beginner
222 pages
5h 23m
English
Content preview from 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
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Chapter 80. Don't Be Clever
Eben Hewitt is a principal on the architecture team at a multibillion-dollar national retail company, where he is currently focused on designing and implementing its service-oriented architecture. He is the author of the upcoming Java SOA Cookbook from O'Reilly.
—Eben Hewitt
GENERAL INTELLIGENCE, RESOURCEFULNESS, thoughtfulness, a breadth and depth of knowledge, and an affinity for precision are laudable qualities in anyone, and particularly prized in architects.
Cleverness, however, carries a certain additional connotation. It implies an ability to quickly conceive of a solution that may get you out of a jam, but that ultimately rests on a gimmick, a shell game, or a switcharoo. We remember clever debaters from high school—always able to play semantics or work the logical fallacies to win the point.
Clever software is expensive, hard to maintain, and brittle. Don't be clever. Be as dumb as you possibly can and still create the appropriate design. The appropriate design will never be clever. If cleverness appears absolutely required, the problem is incorrectly framed; reset the problem. Reframe it until you can be dumb again. Work in rough chalk sketches; stay general. Let go of the flavor of the day. It takes a smart architect to be dumb.
It is our cleverness that allows us to trick software into working. Don't be the attorney who gets your software off on ...
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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.