Chapter 1. Brave new world

Software development is an art. It isn’t predictable enough to be engineering. It isn’t rigorous enough to be science. We’re artists—and that’s not a good thing. We find it hard to work in teams, we find it hard to deliver on deadlines, and we find it hard to focus on practical results. Anyone can claim to be a software developer; opening a text editor is no more difficult than picking up a paint brush. A small number of painters are 10 times better than others. A small number of coders also are 10 times better than others. But most of us are working on bad instincts.

Unlike art, software has to work. It has business problems to solve, users to serve, and content to deliver. We have a thousand opinions among ourselves ...

Get The Tao of Microservices now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.