What you need to know about them without any mysteries left to uncover. — You’ve heard about architectural fitness functions, but most of the material you find lacks concrete details. Let’s fix that. I’ll explain: What architectural fitness functions are What they help you do How they relate to other test types and architecture practices How to build them and use them Where to…

Why never finishing will leave you a worse person and worse off. — Being indecisive and/or wracking up heaps of unfinished work are two things that can send you into a tailspin. On this note—and on the occasion of going on summer vacation—I want to share two scenarios, one every-day, and one for those of you doing creative work. There are real and…

A short reflection. — There is no bad code. It just does the wrong thing very efficiently. The words effective and efficient both mean “capable of producing a result,” but there is an important difference. Effective means “producing a result that is wanted”. Efficient means “capable of producing desired results without wasting materials, time…

EventCatalog is great! But you can make it even better—let me show you how. — David Boyne’s open source project EventCatalog is an “Open Source project that helps you document your events, services and domains”. It’s a great tool to create discoverability of your event landscape. I love it! EventCatalog: Discover, Explore and Document your Event Driven Architectures. An open source tool powered by markdown to document your Event Driven Architecture.www.eventcatalog.dev

Tips and tricks for a totally zen online life, in terms of privacy, security, and cleanliness. — If you are anything like me, you trial all kinds of new digital products, creating accounts here and there, and you probably keep a few email addresses around—or you have an overburdened, overtaxed poor Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail account that has suffered, but worked, faithfully through the years. It’s easy to get into…

…and what you can do about it. — I am absurdly interested in how organizations with a big software engineering base can grow better. Before we get better, though, we need to see where we are right now. During a lazy Saturday, I read and collected a lot of candid opinions on what actual, real software engineers have…

Why software fails and how you can practically address it with a six-step plan — It is common for software-producing teams to struggle with their business counterparts when it comes to technical debt. If you’ve ever built a software system or product, have been hampered by how hard it is to evolve it at the expected rate, and subsequently tried to argue for allocating time…

An unorthodox but whole-hearted message to all C-level people everywhere. — Software is eating the world. — Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World” (2011) In business, survival is neither guaranteed, nor mandatory. Does your organizational strategy clearly include the production of novel software and realizing value through it? No? Don’t build software. Is your market de facto software? No…

The decline and possible restoration of reason in organizations that make software against their will or better judgment. — Now that every company is a software company, recent discussions with people around me (including those not in the software business) made me rediscover the abysmal state that software delivery is in, at many places. This article will share some of my reflections on that, as well as let me…