Hitchhiker's Guide to Software Architecture and Everything Else - by Michael Stal

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Books, books, books and tools

In vacations I often dedicate some time to reading new interesting books as well as experimenting with programming languages. For a software architect I consider it essential to stay in sync with technology evolution. Honestly, I do not believe in ivory tower architects who just know UML and Powerpoint. So, what are my plans for this christmas season?

  • One of my favorites is Martin Fowler’s and Rebecca Parson’s book “Domain-Specific Languages”! This book explains DSLs but also educates how to practically leverage internal and external DSLs.
  • From the Pragmatic Programmers I received “Seven Languages in Seven Weeks” by Bruce A. who provides a hands-on tour on Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. If you are a fan of programming languages, this is definitely a good read.
  • Of course, I am also enjoying fiction books as well such as Michael Crichton’s “The Great Train Robbery”. I recently started to read Crichton’s novels and really like his work. In addition, I am reading some layman books on the universe and quantum physics. I am currently  too lazy to reread Feynman’s Lecture Notes on Physics.
  • For my preparation for OOP 2011 where I will give three talks, one on actor-based programming, one on Scala, and one on design tactics, I have programmed a lot with Scala 2.8.1, sbt, and Akka.   But I am also currently trying to dive more into Clojure. I used Lisp in the university, recovered my knowledge a few years ago, and now starting to get familiar with Clojure. This is where monads come in. Interestingly, there are many definitions and explanations of monads but none of the is really decent. Maybe, I will give a try in the future, and also fail Smile

So many new things to learn in such little time. Unfortunately, the times are over where I could learn the whole JDK or .NET in a weekend. Software engineers have to get more and more focused. It is even impossible to keep yourself up-to-date with enterprise technologies alone, or concurrency techniques, or mobile computing, you name it. Nonetheless, systems are gaining more and more complexity, becoming bigger, using more technologies. Interestingly, we are always testing our limits. No matter how excellent our tools are, we try building systems that are more complex than our skills allow. With other words, technology and complexity are always ahead of us. Software architectures do not only fail to master inherent complexity but become beasts filled with accidental complexity. Our capabilities do not scale with our problems. Did I mention Henri Petroski’s book “Learning from Failure”. The essence of this book is that we always will go over the limits, but the best thing to survive is to learn from failure. This basically resembles what Thomas Kuhn once said about technology evolution and revolution.

Fortunately, it also means a lot of fun to learn new things or technologies, try them out, learn their strengths and weaknesses, increase your mental toolset. It opens the horizon to some new ideas and ways. This is why learning is one of the most important skills for software engineers.  

So, what are your plans for the rest of this year?

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