Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: IT Architecture

  • “Technology standardization is commercial diplomacy”

    Paul Ford has a very good article in the New Yorker on the cut and thrust involved in the making of standards, in particular, the making of Web Standards.  My post’s title is a direct quote from Stephen Walli, who is mentioned in the article as “a veteran of many such [standardisation] efforts”.

    The article brings back memories (both fond and frustrating) of the time when I was embroiled in the standardization processes swirling round the OSF and X/Open groups. I got to count Stephen as one of my friends and travelling companions from that time. As Stephen wrote:

    Technology standardization is commercial diplomacy and the purpose of individual players (as with all diplomats) is to expand one’s area of economic influence while defending sovereign territory.

    Ah, yes, I remember it well…

  • A Field Guide to Software Engineers

    This field guide is so true – in the course of my time in the computer business, I’ve met examples of all of these species. I have occasionally been known to wake up in a cold sweat thinking about some of them.

  • How Google Works

    The TED Blog has a pointer to some interesting details of how Google searches are architected. A snippet that I found intriguing:
    Google’s servers basically make a copy of the entire Web, page by page, every few days, storing it in their huge data centers.
    This reminds me of the mapmakers in the story by Borges, who ended up creating a map of their kingdom at a scale of 1:1…
     

  • Achitectures For Conversation

    This may seem a little esoteric for many people, but since, in a former life, I was an IT Architect, this presentation by Andrew Hinton certainly resonated with me…

  • Taking Me Back…

    In a former life, I was a software architect. Reading Roger Sessions’ excellent paper on A Better Path To Enterprise Architectures brings it all back. Do I miss it? Nah…
     
    (hat tip to Coding Horror)

  • The Enterprise Library

    I worked in the IT services of Shell as an IT architect. One of the things that I have been pleased to see over the last few years is an appreciation by the IT vendors of the importance of architecture. Both IBM and Microsoft have been doing good work on documenting and sharing their work in this area.

    Last month, Microsoft released the latest version of its Enterprise Library – containing patterns designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges.

    This version of the Enterprise Library Patterns and Practices can be found here.