Review – A Short History of Nearly Everything

I’ve just posted my review of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everthing”. I found it an excellent holiday read, athough a general science book with almost no illustrations or equations took a bit of getting used to. For more, please read my full review.

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A Short History of Nearly Everything

Science for the verbally-minded Continue reading

Tuesday, August 16, 2005 in Reviews

Metropolis – Where Do You Want To Live Today?

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about a “city planning” metaphor for Enterprise Architecture development. Pat Helland’s article “Metropolis” in the Microsoft Architecture Journal is a very good example (see my post on this for some key Continue reading

Monday, August 8, 2005 in Agile & Architecture, Thoughts on the World

My Favourite Films – An Exercise in Over-Analysis

A bit of a change from my more serious posts, but maybe a useful lesson in analysis, here’s the sorry tale of just how complicated I managed to make listing my top ten favourtite films. I hope it gives you Continue reading

Review – Enterprise Integration Patterns

I’ve just posted my review of Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolfe’s excellent book on Enterprise Integration using messaging, “Enterprise Integration Patterns”. Overall it’s an excellent book, and wiil probably become a “bible” for those involved in the high-level design of Continue reading

Sunday, July 24, 2005 in Agile & Architecture, Reviews, Thoughts on the World

Enterprise Integration Patterms

An excellent book which will become a standard reference Continue reading

Interfaces and Document IDs – A Rant

Please forgive me if this sounds like a rant, but I’m very annoyed. Someone who should know better has without warning changed a public interface, with the inevitable effect that dependent systems, in particular my blog, have broken. The offender? Continue reading

Monday, July 18, 2005 in Thoughts on the World

Metropolis – a Metaphor for IT Maturity

I’ve just read an excellent paper by Pat Helland of Microsoft, in which he likens the development of cities and manufacturing in the 19th century to the development of systems and business models now. His conclusion – IT at the Continue reading

Monday, July 11, 2005 in Agile & Architecture, Thoughts on the World

Death of the Microsoft Architecture Journal?

Does anybody know if Microsoft have killed off their Architecture Journal? I was just about to write a post linking to it, and I find the content has been moved to an archive area and all the links have changed. Continue reading

Cirrus Minor – A New Architecture Site

Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz has set up an interesting new site / blog dedicated to software architecture. Of particular note, he’s trying to put some detail on the architecture “process” which is often negelcted as a single box on the development process Continue reading

Tuesday, June 28, 2005 in Agile & Architecture, Thoughts on the World

Domain-Specific Languages

There seems to be quite a lot of activity on the “Domain Specific Language” front at the moment. Martin Fowler published “Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?”, in which he concludes that the common programming pattern of setting Continue reading

Sunday, June 26, 2005 in Agile & Architecture, Code & Development, Thoughts on the World

The Fear Premium

In an interesting echo of my last piece (Why Software Isn’t Like Building Construction), Scott Ambler has analysed bureaucratic processes as a response to management fear about what can go wrong in software development. His conclusion is that these processes Continue reading

Thursday, June 23, 2005 in Agile & Architecture, Thoughts on the World