Architecture Weekly #86 - 1st August 2022

Aug 1

Welcome to the new week!

Let’s start with it with an invitation. Thanks to the JetBrains invitation, I’ll be showing a “Pragmatic Event Sourcing in .NET With Marten”. It’ll be on Tuesday, August 16, 2022, 14:00 – 15:00 UTC. Feel invited, and register here!

To close my self-promotion part, I also encourage you to look at my last article. I thoroughly explained how you could model Union types in C# and why you could consider doing that. I think I might be the first to show Tuples as the option to do that.

An intriguing experiment happened when I was at the DDDEU over a month ago. Multiple speakers ran the keynote in the form of a workshop. Yeah, a workshop for the few hundred people audience. Everyone could put their feedback through the mobile app and share thoughts with people near them. What was the topic? What’s the architect's role, and how to effectively shape it. The emphasis was put on being the advisor and if that works well. The results of the survey are available in the GitHub repo:

DDDEU - A Commune in the Ivory Tower? - A New Approach to Architecture

My personal take about the advice process as a collaborative process is that it’s not easy. It has to be aligned and driven both bottom-up and top-down. People need to learn it and trust it, but also top management needs to back that up. Without that, it will fail. It’s a learning process and mostly about building the proper organisational culture. You need to develop a safe environment where it’s okay to fail. Yet, in some companies, it will require a lot of days do day work, sometimes even enforcing democracy… It’s just not happening by a single decision.

One of the critical aspects of decision-making is transparently doing that. Jessica Kerr nicely summarised that in:

Jessica Kerr - To share the work, share the decisions

Making decisions in public, giving people the option to state their point of view, and sharing feedback enable collaboration. It’s not easy, it requires grooming, but it pays off if done right.

As one good picture speaks more than thousands of words, it’s essential to visualise your design and decision. That makes it easier to understand and follow. In recent years, visual collaboration tooling has been emerging. It’s worth playing with different tools to see how it works. One of the most important to map and shape your systems are context maps and the C4 model. See more:

Of course, to make it maintainable, it’s crucial to have a (semi)automated process. Some time ago, I wrote that the best way to maintain documentation is not to have to maintain it. How come? Read more in How to successfully do documentation without a maintenance burden.

Google released a new language. Yup, we have a shortage of them. It sounds like Go is not enough, and Rust is not promising, as they released:

Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++

I’m not sure what to think about it yet, but I can already say that Google has the notion for the great-looking syntax in their languages...

Did you know that Slack is a tool to enable online collaboration? The slack company just realised that:

Mashable - Slack finally realized that Slack makes permanent remote work possible

From where I’m sitting, why you’d need to try to squeeze all the devs in a single location in the world (Bay Area et al.) and need to pay them compensation for the costs of living that went higher as they tried to squeeze all of the devs in the single place. Also built tools for online collaboration, not being able to do it on your own. Even those sentences read as a vicious circle.

Check also other links!

Cheers
Oskar

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