Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Iām being shuffled sideways into a software architecture role at work, presumably because my whiteboard output is valued more than my code š and I thought Iād try and find out what the rest of the world thought that meant.
Turns out thereās almost no way of telling anymore, because the internet is filled with genai listicles on random subjects, some of which even have the same goddamn title. Finding anything from the beforetimes basically involves searching reddit and hoping for the best.
Anyway, I eventually found some non-obviously-ai-generated work and books, and it turns out that even before llms flooded the zone with shit no-one knew what software architecture was, and the people who opined on it were basically in the business of creating bespoke hammers and declaring everything else to be the specific kind of nails that they were best at smashing.
Guess Iāll be expensing a nice set of rainbow whiteboard markers for my personal use, and making it up as I go along.
The zone has indeed always been flooded, especially since its a title that collides with āintegration architectā and other similar titles whose jobs are completely different. That being said, itās a title Iāve held before, and I really enjoyed the work I got to do. My perspective will be a little skewed here because I specifically do security architecture work, which is mostly consulting-style āhey come look at this design we made is it bad?ā rather than developing systems from scratch, but hereās my take:
Architecture is mostly about systems thinking-- youāre not as responsible for whether each individual feature, service, component etc is implemented exactly to spec or perfectly correctly, but you are responsible for understanding how theyāll fit together, what parts are dangerous and DO need extra attention, and catching features/design elements early on that need to be cut because theyāre impossible or create tons of unneeded tech debt. Speaking of tech debt, making the call about where its okay to have a component be awful and hacky, versus where v1 absolutely still needs to be bulletproof probably falls into the purvey of architecture work too. Youāre also probably the person who will end up creating the system diagrams and at least the skeleton of the internal docs for your system, because youāre responsible for making sure people who interact with it understand its limitations as well.
I think the reason so much of the advice on this sort of work is bad or nonexistent is that when you try to boil the above down to a set of concrete practices or checklists, they get utterly massive, because so much of the work (in my experience) is knowing what NOT to focus on, where you can get away with really general abstractions, etc, while still being technically capable enough to dive into the parts that really do deserve the attention.
In addition to the nice markers and whiteboard, Iād plug getting comfortable with some sort of diagramming software, if you arenāt already. Thereās tons of options, theyāre all pretty much Fine IMO.
For reading, Iād suggest at least checking out the first few chapters of Engineering A Safer World , as it definitely had a big influence on how I practice architecture.
Congratulations, you figured it out! Read Clean Architecture and then ignore the parts you donāt like and youāll make it
Ugh OK I have to vent:
Iām getting pushed into more of a design role because oops my company accidentally fired or drove away all of a team of a dozen people except for me after forgetting for a few years that the code I work on is actually mission critical.
I do my best at designing stuff and delegating the implementation to my coworkers. Itās not one of my strengths but thereās enough technical debt from when I was solo-maintaining everything for a few years that I know what needs improving and how to improve it.
But none of my coworkers are domain experts, they havenāt been given enough free time for me to train them into domain experts, thereās only one of me, and the higher ups are continuously surprised that stuff is going so slow. Itās frustrating for everyone involved.
I actually wouldnāt mind architecture or design work in better circumstances since I love to chat with people; but it feels like my employer has put me in an impossible position. At the moment Iām just trying to hang in there for some health insurance reasons; but in a few years I plan to leave for greener pastures where I can go a day without hearing the word āagenticā.