Little Architecture Huddle

"I've heard (and used) YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) quite often in my software development career. It's a battle cry for shipping a minimum viable product and letting the real-world usage dictate what new features and improvements are really needed. Generally speaking I think that this ruthless minimalism is a good thing. I think we've all fallen into the "pie in the sky" thinking about adding lots of bells and whistles to whatever feature we're working on. I for one also know the feeling of spending a lot of time on one aspect of a new feature only to later discover that no one really uses it. I like to think that, over time, I've begun to develop some sense of when a given feature is likely to be useful and when I should YAGNI it out of my task list, but then again I also feel like the more I know the less I know. Lately I'm finding that when I'm in doubt it's best to err on the side of doing less and keeping things as simple as possible."

"Over the past decade, Red Gate has learned a lot, often the hard way, about the value of delivering software early and often or, perhaps more accurately, the cost of not doing so. Here, we explain what exactly we've learned and how we've adapted our software delivery processes, as a result. "

"If you are a developer that writes asynchronous code for composite applications in the cloud, you know what we are talking about, for everybody else Rx Extensions is a set of libraries that makes asynchronous programming a lot easier. As Dave Sexton describes it, "If asynchronous spaghetti code were a disease, Rx is the cure.""

"Datomic is a new database designed as a composition of simple services. It strives to strike a balance between the capabilities of the traditional RDBMS and the elastic scalability of the new generation of redundant distributed storage systems."

"In my consultant career, no matter the kind of company I visited, from the tiny startup to the largest fortune 500 corporation, they all have in common to be entangled in spaghetti. Spaghetti means poorly structured code. Spaghetti means high maintenance and evolution cost. Spaghetti means frustration, friction and lack of motivation for everyone in the team. And often, spaghetti means project failure."

"In this walkthrough I'll guide you through the steps of configuring a development environment for Service Bus for Windows Server (Service Bus 1.0 Beta) and creating a simple application. This post is a condensed version of the contents from previous link. If you'd rather to read the whole document, you are welcome to do so. On the other hand, if you prefer a shorter version with step-by-step guidance, please read on! Throughout the post we'll also touch upon key concepts you need to understand to manage and use Service Bus. So, if you learn better with hands-on experiments, this is a perfect post (I hope) for you to get started. "

"The following tutorial guides you through the steps required to create a basic Service Bus for Windows Server application, and contains the following steps:"

" This guide is focused on building highly scalable, highly available, and maintainable applications with the Command & Query Responsibility Segregation and the Event Sourcing architectural patterns. It presents a learning journey, not definitive guidance. It describes the experiences of a development team with no prior CQRS proficiency in building, deploying (to Windows Azure), and maintaining a sample real-world, complex, enterprise system to showcase various CQRS and ES concepts, challenges, and techniques. The development team did not work in isolation; we actively sought input from industry experts and from a wide group of advisors to ensure that the guidance is both detailed and practical. "

" Alexey Karpik reviews JS libraries - Sencha, JQuery, Jo-, frameworks -Rhomobile, M-Project-, and tools -PhoneGap, MoSync, Appcelerator, Antenna-, discussing how they fare with mobile development. "

"This is a case study that describes how Kanban and lean development techniques were used to rescue a distressed project."

"distributed-computingWe've had a lot of success applying the principles and practices of the Advanced Distributed Systems Design course into our project and Udi Dahan asked if I could shed some more light on how things played out for us, so here it is."

"Come hear how Code Contracts provides a set of tools for design-by-contract programming and how Pex is an advanced unit-testing tool that uses automated program exploration to intelligently create unit tests with high code coverage. See how they work together so that your code has fewer defects. Learn about new features for Code Contracts including automatic documentation generation, call-site checking for components and reference assemblies for the .NET Framework and for Pex including a light-weight mocking framework, improved support for large code bases, and more thorough test input generation."

"What is the culture game? It is a game you win by upgrading your company culture to value continuous organizational learning. Because of the current pace of change, organizations that learn fast can repeatedly outflank and outperform their so-called peers. New companies can seemingly come out of nowhere to develop and dominate new opportunities and prosper. The pace of change bestows nearly immediate rewards on the most adaptive company cultures. To be adaptive as an organization, that organization must intentionally engage in continuous learning. Organizational learning is by no means random but rather, a highly intentional act. Getting there is a game. . . and culture is the name of the game."

"Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs."

"As a change agent, you constantly need to reassure people that the path we follow is worthwhile traveling. This need is often expressed in the form of critique and difficult questions. When I coach Agile teams, this is often the case. The same thing happens when introducing Kanban. However, I noticed that Kanban raises much harder questions on a management and leadership level, once people are introduced to the basics and start to explore the subject on their own. For instance: "How can we plan if we measure instead of estimate?""

"Gabriel Schenker's excellent series of posts on "How we got rid of the database" offers a great insight on the benefits of a CQRS/ES application. One of the problems often seen with designing user interfaces that introduce eventual consistency into the mix is how to present this new paradigm to the end user. But whether we've thought or not, eventual consistency is all around us, as Gabriel points out in a few examples:"

"If you´ve read my previous posts about why I deem WCF more of a problem than a solution and how I think we should switch to asynchronous only communication in distributed application, you might be wondering, how this could be done in an easy way."

"If you're in software development, new techniques, languages and concepts pop up all of the time. We all feel those nagging doubts every now and then: "can I keep up with the changes and stay competitive?" Take a moment, and sum a line from my favourite movie, Casablanca: "The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.""

"Do you need to get your Java-based and .NET-based components to work together? JNBridgePro allows you to connect anything Java to anything .NET, anywhere: whether your components are running in the same process, across a network, or in the cloud. JNBridgePro's high-performance bridging architecture removes the complexities of cross-platform interop; you can generate a solution within a day - instead of weeks. "

"The data-quality solution provided by Data Quality Services (DQS) enables a data steward or IT professional to maintain the quality of their data and ensure that the data is suited for its business usage. DQS is a knowledge-driven solution that provides both computer-assisted and interactive ways to manage the integrity and quality of your data sources. DQS enables you to discover, build, and manage knowledge about your data. You can then use that knowledge to perform data cleansing, matching, and profiling. You can also leverage the cloud-based services of reference data providers in a DQS data-quality project."