Learning Software Architecture

RE: Conway's law being mentioned in this, and good software book recommendations

A book called Kill it with Fire goes into this part as well, and it highlights things that I found important to hear in light of the popular comment section takes:

• the original paper also has other interesting observations
• it has become somewhat of incantation: people believe in it retrospectively.
• it's not an unavoidable result.

The book in general has some very interesting takes on software in big orgs, so I don't want to spoil it too much. It is one of my favorite reads and I'd heartily recommend it.

I'd like to share The Architecture of Open Source Applications here as well. I think this is an incredible resource to anyone interested in the architecture of applications and tools. It is really great not just hearing the what but the why - and straight from the proverbial horse's mouth.

I wanted to post this because classes about software design/architecture are usually focused on learning (OOP) patterns. At least in my experience, there was no principled approach: it's mostly a series of example problems and a pattern that goes with it.

A common advise is "practice" but it's one of those practices that require a lot of knowledge to get started with in the first place ! It's also not easy to determine what a good solution is, you need mentoring as well.

I'd like to see more articles or books that focus on different issues, solutions and their counterfactuals instead of "here's a problem and solution pair" where all the hard work goes untold.

I was even “an architect” for our course project, that stuff was mostly make-believe, kindergarteners playing fire-fighters.

Oh man, that's such a wonderful characterization of the type of software architecture work done at uni. Messing around with OOD on those small class cards resulting in completely unrealistic designs with pattern overusage etc without actually learning anything. Spot on!