"What is architecture?" elicits different answers depending on who you ask. Change the question to "What is architecture for?" and you will get only one answer: to support decision making. Optimizing software engineering for decision making offers a unifying perspective.

I wondered, why do we need to manage stakeholders' expectations? If you have a stake in the investment, you should expect the associated risk and uncertainty. It is irrational to be frustrated when things do not go to plan. I have a similar qualm with the idea of managing up.

How much of our effort goes towards improving things we would be better off not doing in the first place? How much do we MAJOR in the MINORS?

We can learn a lot about Software Development by playing retro games. Explore what Composition, Inheritance and what Composition over Inheritance means with a little help from our 8-bit friends! Hope you enjoy.

I love Jeff's line of reasoning. - Stakeholders might be unaware of what to expect (complex domain). - People on the ground know the reality better (complicated domain). So, people on the ground should inform reality to stakeholders, therefore managing their expectations.

This bias happens over and over again to me when I'm delegating. Tasks I thought I didn't like I shouldn't delegate, because others wouldn't like the task either.

You don't need to be a mathematician to do good math. You don't need to be an engineer to write good code. You don't need to be a leader to provide good leadership.

My coachees know when the workshop questions I present have been hand-crafted or written by ChatGPT, oops.

Has any of you built an open-source project and gotten it adopted by a company? I'd love to know what important things you'd typically look at from the original creator/maintainer's point of view.

The solution is simple. Don’t mock what you don’t own. Introduce your own interface and mock its behaviour. Write a contract test for the implementation of the interface. The contract test should actually call the API and at least confirm mocks’ assumptions.

Done. Handing Laconia over to someone else feels like I'm handing over my child to someone else. It's odd. My biggest reward from this work is the opportunity to work with the loveliest and smartest people in tech Marton Veto Thomas Ankcorn Thomas Schoffelen!

I'm looking for someone to join us at Aardling to bring better modelling and software design to our clients. If you're a software architect and you have experience coaching teams, building a continuous delivery mindset, get in touch :-) aardling.eu/en/software-ar…

I attended Eric Evans' Software Design Masterclass held in DDD Europe, and wrote one of my many learnings here: read.ceilfors.com/p/unspoken-sec…

Better problem understanding leads to better design. This technique from Eric Evans helps achieve exactly that. read.ceilfors.com/p/concrete-exa…