Book – 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

I enjoyed reading the 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and not long time ago I found that is maintained by the publisher an unedited original text of the book.

I hope that these will make you curious to sip wisdom of some of the leading software architects. Here are some for the thirsty:

Architecting is about balancing: “In summary, software architecting is about more than just the classical technical activities; it is about balancing technical requirements with the business requirements of stakeholders in the project.”

Architectural Tradeoffs: “Every software architect should know and understand that you can’t have it all.”

Challenge assumptions – especially your own: “Facts and assumptions are the pillars on which your software will be built. Whatever they are, make sure the foundations are solid.”

A word of warning, don’t expect a technical recipe of coding, it might appear elusive and witty as any of the old aphorisms, this is a modern apophthegmata laconica. You might wonder why 97 and not 78 as in the past, or any other number.

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It’s a strong prime 🙂

Which is, of course, true, but neither particularly useful nor the actual reason. It’s 97 because that is conveniently close to 100 without actually being 100 or trying too obviously not to be (e.g., 99 and 101). It’s around 100 because that allows for a diverse range of short items, each occupying two pages in printed form, and amounts to a reasonably sized book. The specific number 97 was chosen by Richard Monson-Haefel, editor of 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, the first book in the series – by definition, all other books in the 97 Things series are somewhat bound to follow the mould!

Significantly fewer items and either the items would be longer, less diverse and more like ordinary articles, which would discourage people from contributing, or the resulting book would be more like a pamphlet. Significantly more items and the items would either have to be shorter, making them little more than abstracts, or the resulting book would be too long for what it’s trying to do.

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It is not the only compilation of wisdom that O’Reilly is spoiling us, there are more, and there is 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know.

BTW there is also a webcast (10 Things Every Software Architect Should Know).