Creating diagrams is a stereotypical software architect task, but the fact of the matter is that a picture can convey a thousand words of information. Diagrams are important for understanding. Google Drawings I’ve been using Google Drawings a lot recently, because of the ease of collaboration and the ability to …

Gary Bernhardt’s Boundaries talk is one of my favorites. In it, he talks about a “functional core” of pure, easily-testable code, surrounded by an “imperative shell” which deals with the messy world outside. It can be delightful to write code in this way: Part of the time, you’re …

Escaping the Technical Debt Cycle A talk by Michael Feathers: Escaping the Technical Debt Cycle In the talk, he urges against most numeric metrics. He praises the Open/Closed Principle as one important way to avoid adding unhealthy debt: In object-oriented programming, the open/closed principle states “software …