Neal Ford

This book is a very high-level overview of the current thinking and challenges in modern software architecture and design. If you can stand the overuse and overstretching of terms from physics and biology such as "quantum", "quanta", "fitness function", etc. you can have a general idea about what it means to design for changeability.

If you subscribe to the idea that the software architecture means "the parts that are difficult to change", you already know how important to it is to design for relatively easy change, because change is one thing that will certainly happen to any software-intensive system that can survive at least a few months.

Some parts of the book is like time travel where the authors compare the architectural patterns from the end of 1990s and beginning of 2000s, and how things changed as of 2018: within the space of few pages they compare and contrast enterprise service bus based architectures with microservices.

The downside of the book: if you aren't already familiar with most of the concepts and techniques, it'll be difficult to understand what the book is all about. And if you're already familiar, then you know that for many of the topics mentioned, there are dedicated and well-written books.

If you want a very broad and high level overview, this book might serve you for a short period of time. If you want to go into more detail, you'll have to dive into titles such as "Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud" and "Architecting for Scale: High Availability for Your Growing Applications|".… (meer)

Silent confession by the majority: Presentations are boring most of the time. Even when you are super enthusiastic about the presentations' topic, they are more or less a disappointment (and when you are not, you truly experience the death by a thousand slides). It is so rare to witness truly great presentations that I can easily remember most of them even after a decade. It is very easy to criticize a bad presentation and the presenter, but until this book, it was not that easy to point to a real solution.

I'm so happy that I can simply tell most of the presenters, hopefully before they unleash their minutes and slides of boredom and confusion on me and my fellow sleepers, to go and read this book twice, if not at least three times. But before I hit them on the head with this book (especially the software developers, who mostly believe that practicing something means giving a good and noteworthy presentation about it, even though they have witnessed uncountable evidence against it), I plan to read it for the second time, and then for the third time. And probably every time before I prepare a presentation, until I gather enough evidence to let me think that I'm capable enough to write a book that is even better.

The book is really about 'just stuff, no fluff', and staying loyal to its premise, it succeeds to provide the reader with concrete advice and step-by-step explanations for very effective presentations. It will probably not turn your next presentation into the keynote of the century, but it will definitely take you a few steps further ahead.

Enthusiastic praise aside, I must conclude with the fact that this book has recently helped me save a presentation I was preparing to present in a European Commission review meeting, in which some of the audience were in a position to evaluate the presented facts in order to decide whether they should let the project continue, or simply put an end to it. Needless to say, I was more than happy to hear their judgment.… (meer)