Little Architecture Huddle

"Kanban represents a unique way of catalyzing the application of Lean product development principles to software development, maintenance and operations. Being a method for driving change Kanban does not prescribe specific roles, practices or ceremonies but instead offers a series of principles to optimize value and flow in your software delivery system. As such, Kanban's focus on context and adaptability has made it increasingly popular for teams working in contexts where traditional Agile methods are not an easy fit and mature Agile teams looking for ways to further optimize their development process."

That dev team must be very motivated and must be doing really great work!

"Thanks to the NoSQL movement, data storage solutions are no longer a solved problem. Many are working hard to build new storage solutions, and even more are willing to use them. On the flip side, if you are a programmer or a solution architect who wants a data storage solution for your application, you have to face the daunting task of weighing and understanding the tradeoffs associated with the application and make a decision. This article explores the data needs of end user applications and various tradeoffs. It provides guidelines on the criteria for selecting data storage choices enabling the architects and developers to make an informed decision."

"vFabric SQLFire is a memory-oriented, shared-nothing distributed data management system designed for applications that demand high speed, scalability and availability."

"In the world of software management there exists a dread place called "dependency hell." The bigger your system grows and the more packages you integrate into your software, the more likely you are to find yourself, one day, in this pit of despair."

"SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability and real-time analytics along with flexible APIs that make custom integration a breeze."

"Socket.IO aims to make realtime apps possible in every browser and mobile device, blurring the differences between the different transport mechanisms. It's care-free realtime 100% in JavaScript."

"Pusher is a hosted API for quickly, easily and securely adding scalable realtime functionality via WebSockets to web and mobile apps."

This is the book I'm currently reading

And? (Quite funny. I was just going through the InfoQ newsletter myself :)

Actually a really good book. Very different topic, more focused on configuration, deployment and operational stuff and not really code.

" Howard Lewis Ship talks about Clojure, a language more concise, testable, and readable than Java, letting the developer to focus on his work rather than a verbose syntax. "

Some very interesting metrics on checking code quality - I like this!

Sounds like this guy is confuse between enterprise architecture and solutions architecture. Or I am. :)

I think both those roles are evolving quite quickly at the moment. The classic Enterprise Architect is having to find new ways to plan, communicate and check quality as more and more teams explore Agile methodologies. The Solution Architect is suddenly playing a more obvious role as a result of the above. My feeling is, it is not so much about people, but about function. The same person could operate as a Solutions Architect most of the day, but then could get together in some kind of Architect's forum and play the role of an Enterprise Architect. That forum then wrestles through the Enterprise Architect issues and establishes the back-bone on which the Agile Development is done. That's what is probably happening, formally or informally in a lot of dev teams at the moment.

"Join us for a Scrum Safari in South Africa this September. It will be a unique opportunity to be exposed to like mindedScrum and Agile practitioners. Come along and spend some time with the big 5."

"The biggest thing in web apps since "rails can't scale" is this idea that "your rdbms doesn't scale." This has gone so far as to be dubbed the coming of age for "nosql" with lots of blog posts and even a meetup. Indeed, there are many promising key-value stores, distributed key-value stores, document oriented dbs, and column oriented db projects on the radar. This is *definitely* a great thing for the web application scene and this level of variety will definitely open doors for organizations large and small in the near and long term."

Best books on Design patterns - anyone read Head First Design Patterns?

" Greg Young discusses how to use events to store data, and how testing, versioning and performance are impacted by an event-centered model. "

"ORM users have grown accustomed to thinking in terms of .NET and LINQ, forgetting the specifics of particular databases, differences in their functionality and effectiveness of certain SQL-constructions. In this article, we shall briefly discuss some of the problems that the user may face in the process of developing an application for Entity Framework (EF), which is meant to interact with Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite rather than Microsoft SQL Server. I hope this will be useful both for users who create an EF-application for these databases for the first time as well as for those who create an application that must support interaction with multiple databases, i.e., SQL Server and Oracle. As examples of implementing EF-providers for databases other than SQL Server, we shall use Devart ADO.NET providers."

"There are sufficient videos available in the video repositories provided by YouTube and Vimeo to make it difficult locating the good ones. In addition, not all of them are professionally produced. However, InfoQ.com could identify some pearls which are worthwhile watching. We have reviewed what we found and tried to figure out the interesting ones. But, of course, such activities are always driven by the author's taste."