Ho John Lee’s Weblog

I caught a couple of the sessions at the SD Forum Web Based Architecture event yesterday. Adam Denning (Senior Director of the Architecture Strategy Team, Microsoft) prefaced his talk by noting the grand titles that software architects often end up with, and the often fuzzy and open-ended nature of the territory.

I liked this take on the role of the software architect, from someone in the audience, which I think was Pat Helland from Amazon:

Q: What’s the job of a software architect?
A: “Make stuff up and sucker people into building it!”

Someone else in the audience observed that unlike physical world architects, software architects are often involved in actually implementing their designs.

Andre Stechert, Kevin Burton, Alok Bhanot, and Colin Johnson had a panel session after lunch. Andre thinks of software architecture as “the parts of the product that are hard to change”.

On rolling out new software: Kevin observes that apps with large user bases (looks at Alok at eBay) are generally penalized for deploying too early, because of a higher premium on stability and security, while startups are penalized for deploying too slowly, because their main issues are establishing a competitive position in the marketplace before burning through their startup resources. Alok says simplicity is good, overengineering is a risk, eBay has 7 levels of processes, sometimes you don’t anticipate the success of your product. (He also avoids citing any specific war stories.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2005 at 9:23 am and is filed under Technology, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.