Thinking Architecturally

Another absolutely excellent highlighted talk, this time by Nathaniel Schutta covering a large number of different essential topics relating to architectural thinking and decision making. One core skill for any architect or developer is seeing tradeoffs everywhere and looking at and evaluating options from multiple different perspectives. It's very easy to fall prey to technology infatuation (this is awesome!) or the opposite (this sucks!) without critical analysis of fitness for the actual use case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5bNZX8tpiI

The talk had plenty of excellent insights, many of which were new to me. And it's always positive to have on-point dry humor to liven up the talk and make the points more memorable.

Some of the best highlights:

• Attention is a resource. It does not scale
• By definition you have to be selective, by definition you cannot read it all
• Architecture is all about tradeoffs but very often it just goes round and round with "on the other hand this on the other hand that". To paraphrase Harry Truman "Please someone give me a one-handed technologist".
• But then again: "Any decent answer to an interesting question begins, "It depends..."" - Kent Beck
• Every tech has drawbacks, acknowledge the negatives
• Interview question (about anything, tools, platforms, etc.) - what would you remove?
• "You haven't mastered a tool until you understand when it should not be used" - Kelsey Hightower
• Create architectural guardrails to align many developers towards the same goal without taking away the option to solve the problem at hand in a more optimal fashion
• We cannot predict the future. "I don't make many predictions... but I do study history.." James Watters
• Adapting to change in architecture - Martin Fowler's tips:
• 1. Build for now
• 2. Choose tech based on ability to evolve
• 3. Evolve one use case at a time 
• It's important to promote a culture of experimentation and constant learning, trying out new tech and prototyping

So many of the points of the talk's more human elements resonated with me. I can often notice myself trying to do it all, trying to learn it all while obviously being impossible I just end up spending time in a very in-optimal fashion. Time is a critical element also regarding decision making - we're forced to make decisions based on incomplete information all the time and building the mental tooling to excel at that is another of the most critical skills (pretty much in everything at life).

Tech radar

Considering the limited time and attention we all have, the best concrete tip for me was mentioning ThoughtWorks' Tech Radar which I wasn't familiar with before (many of you probably are).

In short Tech Radar is an annual / semi-annual publication by ThoughtWorks (known for many best as the place where Martin Fowler is the chief scientist) which provides an opinionated view (in the best of ways) into specific techniques, platforms, tools etc. that developers and organizations should definitely adopt, asses trial or ignore. These suggestions come with brief analysis and rationale as to why that is the case which provide contextual information also on how to mitigate the downsides.

You can find it here: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar