nthread

I’ve always been a big fan of the joelonsoftware blog, and in the area of software architecture, Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You and Things You Should Never Do. Generally, if you have not read Joel’s blog or books, go through the best of in the right nav and read most of it.

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know has a very good list of gotcha’s and rules of thumbs for software architects.

The thing that got me thinking about this was Agile Architecture, a good blog today about keeping architecture moving along during a project, always a good idea.

All of these are good reads, and it makes me think about the useless courses in software engineering I took in university where professors spent hours excitedly talking about the capability maturity model. I guess it didn’t matter, I really didn’t know how to work through a big project in school.

• A key thing with any project is that the development and design be broken up into phases that are small enough to think through and get done.
• If the tools and frameworks that you are trying to develop with are hard to use or seem like a pain to develop with, they just aren’t the right ones. There are easy to use tools for everything out there.
• In general, do a project the easiest way possible. Sometimes people try to do things because they feel like they are the “right” way to do things, even though they aren’t the easiest. These are not the right way to do things.

Keep it simple.