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I gotta say I am surprised and a little disheartened by all the negativity around this post and Fowler in general. Fowler's writing has been a huge inspiration

I gotta say I am surprised and a little disheartened by all the negativity around this post and Fowler in general. Fowler's writing has been a huge inspiration to me in my career. I'm about to gift a copy of his book "Refactoring" to one of the junior engineers I work with for instance. I think the idea of an architecture as a social construct is very fitting. Software is hard when multiple people are working on it with differing backgrounds and experience. Having a rough outline (emphasis on rough here) of "what lives where" and "what is allowed to talk to what" is absolutely critical IMO. It's how your team can effectively reason about a system and add new features to it. It should also be a living thing in that it's something that is continually refined, discussed, and changed as the needs of the business change. Done right, its an organic process that really helps deliver more robust software that everyone involved has a high level understanding of. Contrast that with an Architecture (capital A) done in Enterprise which delivers a static artifact that does not allow for any creativity and micromanages every aspect of it. It's split off into chunks and no one without an expert level of knowledge can easily understand it. That kind of design will almost certainly fall over the first time there needs to be a change to it. It's important to point out the difference because that is NOT what Fowler is recommending in his writings.

wpietri 7y ago
Totally. In a side room at Java One in 1999 or 2000 I saw Fowler talking about Refactoring, and he happened to bring Kent Beck up on stage to talk a bit. If I hadn't been exposed to their ideas, I surely would have left software by now. Over and over, my experience was building something that slowly got less tractable over time, where eventually we'd just want to do a big rewrite. It sucked! I had tried the big-design-up-front approach, where I thought real hard for a long time before building. That might push out the rewrite date some, but definitely not forever. It was dispiriting, a slow, sticky death. That combined with crunches and burnout was slowly making me hate something I had loved doing. But their main point was that code bases didn't have to end in an entropic snarl. That with decent tests and a little elbow grease, code could get better organized every time we touched it. That instead of death by papercut, we could make things a little better every day. Better for the users, better for the business, better for the developers. They weren't promoting silver architecture bullets. They were saying that we should trust and empower teams to figure it out. That if we gave them room and tools to figure it out, everybody would end up happier. It made a huge difference in my life, so it's weird to see people here aggressively putting words in Fowler's mouth, words that seem entirely at odds with my experience of him and his work.
- vikingcaffiene 7y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to write this. I really hope that the latest generation of developers don’t see all the negative HN hive mind comments and discount writings like this.
jammygit 7y ago
I find Fowler writes/speaks more clearly about topics than anybody else. A few of these topics like refactoring or RESTful design have been very helpful for me.

wpietri 7y ago

Totally. In a side room at Java One in 1999 or 2000 I saw Fowler talking about Refactoring, and he happened to bring Kent Beck up on stage to talk a bit. If I hadn't been exposed to their ideas, I surely would have left software by now. Over and over, my experience was building something that slowly got less tractable over time, where eventually we'd just want to do a big rewrite. It sucked! I had tried the big-design-up-front approach, where I thought real hard for a long time before building. That might push out the rewrite date some, but definitely not forever. It was dispiriting, a slow, sticky death. That combined with crunches and burnout was slowly making me hate something I had loved doing. But their main point was that code bases didn't have to end in an entropic snarl. That with decent tests and a little elbow grease, code could get better organized every time we touched it. That instead of death by papercut, we could make things a little better every day. Better for the users, better for the business, better for the developers. They weren't promoting silver architecture bullets. They were saying that we should trust and empower teams to figure it out. That if we gave them room and tools to figure it out, everybody would end up happier. It made a huge difference in my life, so it's weird to see people here aggressively putting words in Fowler's mouth, words that seem entirely at odds with my experience of him and his work.

vikingcaffiene 7y ago
Thanks for taking the time to write this. I really hope that the latest generation of developers don’t see all the negative HN hive mind comments and discount writings like this.

jammygit 7y ago

I find Fowler writes/speaks more clearly about topics than anybody else. A few of these topics like refactoring or RESTful design have been very helpful for me.