I recently came across a talk on YouTube titled History of Software Engineering, given by Paolo Perrotta. Normally I find online videos to have a low information-to-time ratio, but this one was excellent. It’s not too long, with plenty of humour, and makes many serious points that resonated with me.
Tag Archives: design
Software Development for Infrastructure
Bjarne Stroustrup
has another very interesting paper on his website. Titled Software Development for Infrastructure, it discusses some key ideas for building software that has “…more stringent correctness, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability requirements than non-essential applications.” It is not a long paper, but offers useful observations and guidelines for building such software systems.
Drop, Throttle, or Buffer
Real-time — or near real-time — data pipelines are all the rage these days. I’ve built one myself, and they are becoming key components of many SaaS platforms. SaaS Analytics, Operations, and Business Intelligence systems often involve moving large amounts of data, received over the public Internet, into complex backend systems. And managing the incoming flow of data to these pipelines is key.
How you should write software design documents
In my last blog post I explained why writing design documents is such a powerful approach to building well-engineered systems. But what should one document?
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Why you should write software design documents
Many software engineers never write design documents. Design documentation takes time, and implementations often proceed so far without any documentation that if it happens, it’s an act of recording what has been done — a tedious task at the best times.
Many software engineers argue “the code exists, it’s running, it’s working, let’s move on and build the next thing.”
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