Architect's Linkblog

10 Links for 10/21/07

Kevin Furbish — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:43:33 +0000

Amazon Architecture
Data Center - The Challanges - Considerations and new technologies related to running a data center.
Hard Questions About Architects - The story of an architect going on a bad interview, and Ted answering the architect’s resulting questions on the role and relevance architects today.
Yahoo! Releases YSlow, Performance Analyzer - This came out over two months ago, but it’s worth highlighting still. YSlow is a Firebug add-on that will analyze your website and recommend ways to speed it up.
The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite) - More evidence that the traditional RDBMS can be improved. This paper reports on a study finding two orders of magnitude performance increase in an OLTP environment measured with the TPC-C benchmark.
Data centers get religion - Data centers are popping up in some non-traditional locations. This article reports on some of them and their benefits.
Avoiding the Icebergs: Top Ten Software Architecture Mistakes - Part 1 and Part 2
Slashdot’s Setup, Part 1- Hardware
Reference Architectures - What reference/proof-of-concept architectures are for and what should be a part of one.

8 Links for 10/9/07

Kevin Furbish — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:32:32 +0000

Parallel Performance: Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines - A new library to simplify development of .NET applications that benefit from multi-core/multiple processors.
What is scalability ?
Building a Fort: Lessons in Software Estimation - A fun story of a fort building project that ran over schedule, and what software project estimation lessons the author learned from the experience.
Should you build your next website using 3tera’s grid OS? - Podcast (with a very nice summary if you don’t want to listen to the whole thing) on 3tera’s AppLogic grid OS to simplify data center deployment, configuration, disaster recovery, etc. through hardware and storage virtualization.
The ESB Question - Steve Vinoski is against ESB’s for most uses and describes why here. Plenty of responses in the comment section too.
YouTube Architecture - Interesting look at YouTube’s current and past architecture and the scalability work they’ve done to handle their load.
5 Web Ways to Shake Up Your Thinking - Some web-based tools (sites, widgets, feeds) for creativity help when you get stuck.
Architecting for Happiness - Architecting a system specifically to produce happy users and what it is that makes people happy.

9 Links for 10/7/07

Kevin Furbish — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 17:55:11 +0000

The Box: A Shortcut to finding Performance Bottlenecks - A simple diagram representing an entire system and how to use it to help track down performance problems.
Subversion or CVS, Bazaar or Mercurial? - A comparison of four open source version control systems, two of which use a newer distributed approach instead of centralized repositories.
Ingredients for Successful Teamwork
The .NET/Java architect training program - part II
Adobe Max 2007 North America - Wrap Up
C# 3.0 Considered Rubenesque? - Is C# getting to be too large a language?
Phishing Forbidden: Current anti-phishing technologies prevent users from taking the bait - “A security team from Yahoo! looks at the state-of-the-art in anti-phishing technologies.” This ignores the study reported in The Emperor’s New Security Indicators showing users will still login even with the image missing.
Java, Ruby, and the Continuous Tax - InfoQ summarizes and links to several blog posts on the “continuous tax” you pay maintaining systems in dynamically typed languages.

11 Links for 9/28/07

Kevin Furbish — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 02:39:27 +0000

One size fits all: A concept whose time has come and gone - A relational DB pioneer promotes rotating data storage (records vertically, fields horizontally) so calculations on the same field over many records is faster over colocated data.
10 Fantastic Free Open Source Downloads For The Enterprise
“Code First” Web Services Reconsidered
Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster - Twitter is one of the largest scale Ruby web applications, so their architecture and performance tweaks is especially interesting to those using or considering Ruby.
What the Web’s most popular sites are running on - The software and hardware used to run seven popular websites.
Digg Architecture - The architecture of the Digg site and lessons learned along the way.
7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails
Multi-Core and Massively Parallel Processors - The impact of the rise of multi-core processors on how we build and design software. Nice summary of the different focus of the chip manufacturers.
Consumer JRE: Leaner, Meaner Java Technology - Enhancements to the JRE to make it more palatable for in-browser applications and controls.
The .NET/Java architect training program - Some suggested topics for a training regimen for would-be Java/.NET architects.
Warning ! Technology mapping has implications - An architectural view to the previous mentioned article on switching back from Ruby to PHP.
Six Sure Fire ways to Sink your Enterprise Architecture

7 Links for 9/9/07

Kevin Furbish — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:32:27 +0000

Rules for Parallel Programming for Multicore - “Eight key rules for multicore programming”.
Dan Pritchett on Architecture at eBay - An interview (audio/visual) with an eBay architect.
Architects during the transition phase - When should a high-paid architect roll off a project? When the complex decisions are done, or when it’s deployed to production? Good discussion in the comments.
Building your first WebLogic Event Server Application - A tutorial from BEA on how to build an application on top of their WebLogic Event Server. It’s vendor specific, but still useful for learning about complex event processing.
Building Secure Web Applications: In today’s era of user-generated content, securing Web apps is more difficult than ever.
Welcome to the Coding Dojo - A wiki all about coding dojos and coding katas. “A Coding Dojo is a meeting where a bunch of coders get together to work on a programming challenge.” Kata are training exercises to be used at dojo meetings.
PowerPoint tips that are clear and to the point - Review and highlights from the book Clear and to the point: 8 psychological principles for compelling powerpoint presentations by Stephen Kosslyn.

6 links for 8/28/07

Kevin Furbish — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 01:45:01 +0000

The RDBMS is dead - It’s worth reading the blog entries pointed to by this one. They ask the question of the readiness of RDBMS’s to handle the trends of less denormalization, shunning transactions and storing immutable data that some large scale sites are using.
IBM SOA Architect Summit - SOA training events around the world from IBM.
The PBA Method - PBA = Perspective Based Architecture. This site decomposes an architect job into four zones (apecific solutions requirements, IT operations, business operations and trends/futures) and ultimately lists a set of questions to be answered.
Practical Enterprise Architecture - Tactical suggestions for effective EA.
In Support of Non-Stop Software - Is it acceptable to have to restart a system every two or three days? The author suggests we start demanding better stability in our systems.
Java needs an overhaul

9 Links for 8/26/07

Kevin Furbish — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:30:18 +0000

The professional architect, Part 2: Overcoming professional challenges in data architecture
AgileEvents - A group calendar for posting/finding Agile-related events.
GPASS: A generalized publish and subscribe solution using WS-Notification standards
High Scalability - Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites - A blog, forums, real life architecture stories and link list all focused on helping you build “bigger, faster, more reliable websites”. Great resource.
Long Bets - Sam Ruby’s bets on the top five architectural changes in the next five years.
Dependency Injection Revisited and More on Ruby - Some thoughts on what’s good and not so good in Ruby.
Better Insight for Business Decisions and Event Processing: The Next Disruptive Technology - Two articles from Doug Henschen about discovering patterns in data as the data is streaming in to systems instead of batch analysis periodically after the data is recorded.

8 Links for 8/22/07

Kevin Furbish — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:55:31 +0000

Catching Up with Scala - Summary of what’s up with Scala, an up and coming OO, functional language.
Role Profile for Software Architects - A nice chart of twelve categories of responsibilities and knowledge that make up the role of a software architect.
Open Source Google-Like Infrastructure Project Hadoop Gains Momentum - Recent status of Hadoop, an open source platform for distributing the processing of large scale computations. Yahoo! is a large supporter.
Most Active Open Source Projects in Codeplex - A list of the top 25 most popular .NET open source project hosted at Codeplex. It’s nice to see the .NET open source community growing.
Web Services Framework for PHP Released - a PHP extension supporting WS* to simplify implementing web service clients and servers.
Software Architecture: Past, Present and Future
Predicting the Next Software Decade - Results of a poll of Enterprise 2007 attendees about the past decade and the upcoming one.
Steve Jobs and the art of the swordsman - Besides being charismatic, what else makes Steve Jobs’s presentations so effective?

12 Links for 8/6/07

Kevin Furbish — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 03:16:52 +0000

Defining the ESB - The “what’s” and “why’s” of ESBs.
Separating Duties to Meet IT Compliance - “If your organization is facing strict audit compliance but struggles with distributed platforms, take a look at how the big boys do it.”
The true meaning of linear scalabilty - Achieving linear scalabilty like Google, Amazon and eBay.
Introduction to JavaFX Script
Local Architecture to a Global Audience - Simon blogs more about his Microsoft Certified architect application process. In this post he includes his MCA submission preamble which discusses how the South African culture impacts himself and his work. It’s interesting both for more info on the MCA process but also for provoking thoughts on how a culture impacts technical work.
The demise of the Gantt Chart in Agile Software Projects
Don’t trust developers with project management - Give some critical thought to their estimates and know that the longer the estimate the greater the potential variance may be.
Top 4 Information Technology Themes Emerging
A&D 2007: User Interface Principles in API Design (Elliotte Rusty Harold) - Arnon’s thoughts on an API design presentation.
SOA and Cross-Service Transactions - A warning against transactions across distributed components. Arnon also follows up with an email exchange with JBoss’s Mark Little to educate about the true academic meaning of transactions and 2PC in More thoughts on transactions, web-services and SOA. And the final follow up post has links to some resources for more info on transaction theory in Distributed Systems Theory.

12 Links for 7/26/07

Kevin Furbish — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:55:10 +0000

Globally Distributed Development - Suggestions for processes needed on globally distributed development teams.
Designing the tactical solution - What should you do when asked to do a quick and dirty solution?
Programming Erlang - An interview with Joe Armstrong about the language he invented, Erlang, for developing highly fault tolerant systems. Ericsson has a 1.7 MLOC Erlang system that gets nine 9’s of reliability.
A Comparison of Push and Pull Techniques for AJAX - A university research project comparing the performance of push and pull AJAX techniques.
Problems with Mobile Security #1 - A summary of what’s wrong with the state of security on the mobile world. Keep in mind it comes from a vendor that sells a product designed to allow secure mobile communications.
Monster Muck Mashup - Mass Video Conversion Using AWS - An overview of an application built on Amazon’s S3, EC2 and SQS web services.
Chris Anderson on WPF - An interview with Chris Anderson, one of the Windows Presentation Foundation architects.
IBM software architect kit - IBM recently updated their list of resources for software architects. It now includes a podcast by Grady Booch, webcasts, white papers, demos and articles.
SOA security 1-2-3, Part 1: Create a roadmap for securing your large-scale SOA application
SOA external newsletter - IBM’s newsletter with “Everything you need to know about Service Oriented Architecture”.
Exceptions vs. Error codes with Services
Internet In Your Pocket – What Does this Mean for Web Testers?
Presentation Tips from Tech-Ed 2007