book-notes

Here are some interesting books I have read and my notes for remembering their content

This project is maintained by heyjiawei

The roles and qualities of an architect in a large enterprise

  1. What does an enterprise architect do?
  1. Why does corporate IT make bad IT decisions?
  1. What should we do when a project or application goes sour?

How to think about architecture at enterprise scale

Gregor observes his surroundings to see how it can applied to architecture. How and why does a coffee chain like Starbucks handle the following:

  1. Exception Handling - when the barista serves up the wrong order what does he/she do? When the client can’t pay, what should the barista do?
  1. Back pressure - when there are many customers who have already placed an order are waiting in line
  2. Why does Starbucks use a different set of terminologies (e.g. venti, tall etc.)
  1. Document decisions
  1. Think in systems

E.g. A heater in control system theory view point, is the element that heats up the room. If the room gets too cold, we turn up the heat. Whereas in system thinking, we reason how variables can affect the system. The room could get colder due to the frequent opening of the door. Warm air escapes the room when the door opens and hence, if we keep the door closed, we can main the room’s warm temperature.

  1. Trade-offs of using vendors applications over developing applications in-house
  1. Killing old systems and constantly upgrading versions
  1. Let the machines do the mundane work.
  1. Architects should come up with their own technical map. What products to use for which areas, which products are compatible with their systems and their strategy for using certain products.

How to communicate to a variety of stakeholders

Architects need to close the gap between technical knowledge and high-level business decision makers. They need to clearly communicate the trade-offs of technical decisions on business.

This is a vague checklist of how one should communicate in their documentation or presentations:

Show them demos to get their attention. This will increase their chances of to listening to you. Show them the results and how they are relevant.

Organisational structures and how they can fail

  1. Control is an illusion

To obtain actual control, you will need 3 elements:

  1. The bad habit of building from bottom up
  1. Having black markets within
  1. Not thinking in terms of scale A large organisation needs to think about scalability. Here are common mistakes:
  1. Implementing agile wrongly

Agile is not:

Agile is:

How to transform traditional organisations

  1. Without pain, it is hard to change
  1. Start embracing economies of speed ather than economies of scale.
  1. Increase and maintain feedback loops
  1. Challenges getting to ‘there’