In Architecture Change: Recognizing Conway's Law we looked at the profound influence Conway's Law has on architecture.

Recently I've looked at two gutsy declarations that an architecture was broken. One recognized that a three-tiered architecture was too complex for their needs. The other recognized that the Ontology tools weren't performing …

I've got lots of examples of places where Conway's Law has turned a good idea into a poor implementation. A classic is a data warehouse where there were three project managers, so they broke things up three ways, leading to a crazy mess of dumb duplication.

Countering that, I've recently …

News Flash: Multi-core programming is "hard". EVERYBODY PANIC.

ZOMFG: We either need new tools, new languages or both! Right Now!

Here's one example. You can find others. "Taming the Multicore Beast":

The next piece is application software, and most of the code that has been written in the past has …

In reflecting on Architecture, I realized that there are some profound differences between "real" architecture and software architecture.

One of the biggest differences is design.

In the earliest days, software was built by very small groups of very bright people. Alan Turing, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Bourne, Ken Thompson …

Got a nice email about architecture -- but the wrong kind.

It was about physical structures, not software.

It is a "bucket-list" of buildings one simply must see. 100 Amazing Buildings Every Architecture Buff Should See. A cool list to have handy.

I know bupkes about buildings. I've lived in them …

Transaction design seems to be really hard for some people. The transactions they build seem to based on some crazy assumptions. The problem is that benchmarking is hard because you have to build enough stuff to get a meaningful benchmark. Everyone thinks your done when really, all you did was …

Here's a quote "standard issues associated w/ a disitributed db". And "There is the push versus pull of data. Say you use push and..." and more stuff after that.

First, by "Distributed Database", the question could mean almost anything. However, they provide the specific example of Oracle's Multi-Master Replication. That …

The question of "Stored Procedures and Triggers" comes up fairly frequently.

Over the years (since the 90's, when stored procedures were introduced to Oracle) I've learned precisely how awful a mistake this technology is.

I've seen numerous problems that have stored procedures as their root cause. I'll identify just a …

After all, programmers are all lazy and stupid.

Got his complaint recently.

"Developers on a fairly routine basis check in code into the wrong branch."

Followed by a common form of the lazy and stupid complaint. "Someone should think about which branch is used for what and when." Clearly "someone …

Context: We're reverse engineering some bad VB application code.

What I saw. "This problem report pushed this module over the 64k limit for modules. Therefore all code used for XYZ has been removed from this module and placed in the new bas module XYZ."

What I learned. Good design -- irrelevant …