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Back when figuring out software engineering and systems design was all the rage, Mel Conway's paper was a fave. His observation--that system designs tend to mi

Back when figuring out software engineering and systems design was all the rage, Mel Conway's paper was a fave. His observation--that system designs tend to mimic the social structure of the development team--was critical when it came to understanding systems and their development. Now, I suspect that, 52 years later, the observation (based upon longitudinal studies) still holds and that the ways committees invent are still not understood. Mel wrote an influential paper on coroutines and compilers, "Design of a Separable Transition-diagram Compiler", which included the first published explanation of the concept proposed organizing a compiler as a set of coroutines. Several compilers based upon his approach were built in the early 1970s at SRI and at consulting firm Polymorphic. Mel also applied for and received US Patent 6272622, Dataflow Processing With Events, which expired in 2019. The patent is very broad and insightful.

cryptonector 5y ago
A great example of Conway's law is Active Directory. Someone at Microsoft figured out that they needed a) new authentication technology (Kerberos, which was new in the sense of "better than NTLM"), b) a general-purpose directory that (a) could use, c) also a general-purpose directory that could be used to serve DNS. What's surprising is that this then led MSFT to create a team to do all three things rather than have disparate, far-flung teams to do it. AD was a huge reason for MSFT's success in the oughts, and still is. The competition completely failed to see the advantage of that approach, and so failed to compete. At Sun Microsystems, for example, the directory server team was very far-flung from the Solaris Security team that owned Kerberos support, and neither had anything to do with DNS in any Sun products, and Sun never did anything about that in part because Solaris was seen as a cost center while the Directory Server product was seen as a profit center.

cryptonector 5y ago

A great example of Conway's law is Active Directory. Someone at Microsoft figured out that they needed a) new authentication technology (Kerberos, which was new in the sense of "better than NTLM"), b) a general-purpose directory that (a) could use, c) also a general-purpose directory that could be used to serve DNS. What's surprising is that this then led MSFT to create a team to do all three things rather than have disparate, far-flung teams to do it. AD was a huge reason for MSFT's success in the oughts, and still is. The competition completely failed to see the advantage of that approach, and so failed to compete. At Sun Microsystems, for example, the directory server team was very far-flung from the Solaris Security team that owned Kerberos support, and neither had anything to do with DNS in any Sun products, and Sun never did anything about that in part because Solaris was seen as a cost center while the Directory Server product was seen as a profit center.