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Book Highlights: 97 things every software architect should know
Essential highlights from the essays
This article was originally published on my website — https://kislayverma.com/books/highlights-97-things-every-software-architect-should-know/
In this truly unique technical book, today’s leading software architects present valuable principles on key development issues that go way beyond technology. More than four dozen architects — including Neal Ford, Michael Nygard, and Bill de Hora — offer advice for communicating with stakeholders, eliminating complexity, empowering developers, and many more practical lessons they’ve learned from years of experience.
“97 things every software architect should know” is a collection of (very) short essays by some of the most effective software architects of our times, and contains practical as well as philosophical guidance for aspiring and practising software architects. Each essay is extremely focussed on a specific them. Most of them talk about concrete scenarios and how to deal with them. They are also independent and can be read one-by-one — there is no progression from one essay to the next.
As someone who has been this role for some time now, it really resonated with me that a lot of the advice is not technical but rather focussed around team work and enablement. These are the parts that are most difficult to internalize for architects because we are trained to think like developers and measure ourselves in terms of “code shipped”. The role of an architect is more than, as the many voices on this book repeatedly tell us.
The moment I started reading “97 things every software architect should know”, I realized that a lot of highlighting was going to happen :). I have included here what I feel are the highlights from the book and cover most of the messages conveyed in it. They are put here is the order of appearance in the book, and like the book, they do not follow a thematic progression. Pulling out highlights like this deprives them of some of the context they are written under, but I feel that these are essential nuggets and stand on their own. This is good place to start if you want a flavour of what you will find inside the book.
