Some Things I Read June 2022
A Taxonomy of Technical Debt
If you are going to focus on any technical debt, focus on the stuff that is contagious.
Getting Real about Managing up
The key takeaway: your manager is not thinking about you, so make their job easy.
How Do Committees Invent?
The classic paper that spawned Conways Law.
Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
The paper made me rethink the relationship between organisational design and software architecture — specifically, the idea that organising a design team is itself a design decision.
We shall see in detail later that the very act of organising a design team means that certain design decisions have already been made, explicitly or otherwise. Given any design team organisation, there is a class of design alternatives which cannot be effectively pursued by such an organisation because the necessary communication paths do not exist. Therefore, there is no such thing as a design group which is both organised and unbiased.
Team Topologies
Recommended by Dennis Hotson. Essentially an extended rumination on Conways Law and how you can leverage that tendency to make better decisions on team structure.
The big takeaway for me at the moment is thinking about software teams more like you think about software: keeping dependencies loosely coupled, agreeing on contracts for communication etc.
The Art of the Tick Tock Doc
A good guide for structuring comms around big disruptive changes in large scale organisations. Communicating effectively is hard.
Sound-Powered Telephone
Telephones that are powered by the mere act of talking into them — no external power source required. There’s something elegant about a communication device that runs on the energy of the communication itself.