A Little Architecture

A couple of months ago I mentioned that O'Reilly was holding an Architectural Kata competition. A few of us spent some time a couple of weeks ago putting together a response. It was a lot of fun and we all learned a lot about software architecture, what it is, and what it isn't. If you're interested in getting some architectural experience I think the idea of a Kata is a great place to start.

Another place to start is looking at what people who have been there and done that have to say about architecture.  Ralph Johnson famously defined software architecture as “the important stuff (whatever that is).” The architect’s job is to understand and balance all of those important things (whatever they are). 

And what are the important things? I'll give you a hint, it's NOT the choice of framework, language, or cloud provider. And it's not about a 6 month planning cycle where you define everything up front. One of the problems with that is that you don't know what you don't know, so how can you make any decisions about it? The decisions you need to make up front are the ones that let you make the other decisions as late as possible, when you have as much information as possible.

And that's good architecture.