Architecture Chat #54
Good turn out at the last Architecture chat, including Guy, who hadn't been to one for over a year, and Murray, a new comer.
- Secunia Corporate Software Scanner - How to identify missing patches etc.
- Discussed the 97 things every software architect should know and Beautiful Architecture books - I'll bring them along next time if anyone wants to borrow them.
- Discussed Facebook's key/value database Cassandra.
- Discussed approaches for publishing and consuming RSS, talked about PubSub Hubbub.
- Discussed selecting technologies for building CRUD Apps, and what are good technologies for learning ORM.
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- Discussed NHibernate being the Swiss army knife, lots of features, interesting place to learn as you will become aware with almost every facet of ORM nomenclature etc.
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- Discussed Summer of NHibernate series of screen casts / tutorials.
- Discussed Entity Framework, Linq2Sql and others including Lightspeed.
- Discussed difference between highly opinionated vs. non-opinionated ORM's.
- Software Craftsmanship - sparked off by this article in the Herald - general consensus was we didn't agree at all with the article, and that there is an obvious disconnect between the view points of academia and practicing developers.
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- Discussed the ideas of Science based engineering rigueur
improving software quality and stopping projects running over
budget, and it's rather short-sighted view of how software
defects originate / what contributes to overall "software
quality". - Big discussion was around Software "engineering" - and
how far removed from other engineering disciplines we are. - Discussed fact that most software development focused
degrees in New Zealand don't qualify you to join IPENZ - and if we could,
most of us wouldn't want to. - Discussed the laughable Idea of forcing developers to
study something every year to "stay current" - everyone
agreed if you're not learning something every day as a developer, your
doing it wrong.
- Discussed the ideas of Science based engineering rigueur
- Service Buses & IoC Containers (the conversation got a bit mixed up between these two) - things we discussed were:
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- When to adopt, i.e. how big does a project have to be, what problems should you be facing.
- Quite a bit of discussion around the misnomer of "how big" being a reason to adopt any technology, rather then how complex, good fit etc.
- Discussed the dangers of adopting technology and practices prematurely.
- Examples of .Net service bus:
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- Discussed the .Net Mailing List - Josh didn't know what it was, which in some way reflects that it's not longer promoted any more, discussed it succumbing to a slow death, how stack overflow affected question traffic etc. - FYI You can still subscribe to the dot.net.nz mailing lists here.
- Expressed annoyance that dot.net.nz no longer works after the "upgrade" to sharepoint, need the www. prefix.
- Wordpress twitter-like themes/plugins, such as the prologue / P2 theme.
- Pomodoro timers, including tomatoes, footballs, iphone apps and even *gasp horror* on-screen timers.
Written on September 7, 2009