Keeling's Design It book is great [1]. It helps teams engage with architecture ideas with concrete activities that end up illuminating what's important. My book tries to address those big ideas head-on, which turns out to be difficult, pedagogically, because it's such an abstract topic.
Which ideas have survived since 2010?
Some operating systems are microkernels, others are monolithic. Some databases are relational, others are document-centric. Some applications are client-server, others are peer-to-peer. These distinctions are probably eternal and if you come back in 100 years you may find systems with those designs even though Windows, Oracle, and Salesforce are long-gone examples. And we'll still be talking about qualities like modifiability and latency.
The field of software architecture is about identifying these eternal abstractions.
See [2] for a compact description.
"ABSTRACT: Software architecture is a set of abstractions that helps you reason about the software you plan to build, or have already built. Our field has had small abstractions for a long time now, but it has taken decades to accumulate larger abstractions, including quality attributes, information hiding, components and connectors, multiple views, and architectural styles. When we design systems, we weave these abstractions together, preserving a chain of intentionality, so that the systems we design do what we want. Twenty years ago, in this magazine, Martin Fowler published the influential essay “Who Needs an Architect?” It’s time for developers to take another look at software architecture and see it as a set of abstractions that helps them reason about software."
Which ideas have survived since 2010?
Some operating systems are microkernels, others are monolithic. Some databases are relational, others are document-centric. Some applications are client-server, others are peer-to-peer. These distinctions are probably eternal and if you come back in 100 years you may find systems with those designs even though Windows, Oracle, and Salesforce are long-gone examples. And we'll still be talking about qualities like modifiability and latency.
The field of software architecture is about identifying these eternal abstractions. See [2] for a compact description.
"ABSTRACT: Software architecture is a set of abstractions that helps you reason about the software you plan to build, or have already built. Our field has had small abstractions for a long time now, but it has taken decades to accumulate larger abstractions, including quality attributes, information hiding, components and connectors, multiple views, and architectural styles. When we design systems, we weave these abstractions together, preserving a chain of intentionality, so that the systems we design do what we want. Twenty years ago, in this magazine, Martin Fowler published the influential essay “Who Needs an Architect?” It’s time for developers to take another look at software architecture and see it as a set of abstractions that helps them reason about software."
[1] Michael Keeling, Design It: From Programmer to Software Architect, https://pragprog.com/titles/mkdsa/design-it/
[2] George Fairbanks, Software Architecture is a Set of Abstractions Jul 2023. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2023/04/10176187/1...