Jan Bosch
It’s highly controversial to claim that there’s no such thing as “the architecture” of a system. On the one hand, folks in R&D use the term to indicate that the technical debt in the system has reached a point where more resources need to be dedicated to architecture refactoring. On the other hand, those on … Read more
As I am slowly emerging from summer vacation, there are a couple of reflections that have come to mind as I am engaging my brain again. One topic that I have been noodling on is that I have noticed an undercurrent of anti-agile thinking in what I read and the people I talk to. It … Read more
Human intelligence is amazing and has led to everything that we experience in our day to day lives. Every thing we use, every idea we communicate around with our peers, every abstraction we use to deal with a complex problem has been created by a human. Nothing exists until it has first been imagined in … Read more
There’s a story from World War II where perfectly normal German men were sent to the eastern front to act as police officers. In three or four years, these sons, brothers, husbands and parents went from ordinary people to absolutely atrocious monsters murdering innocent men, women and children and committing the most horrible crimes. In … Read more
In science, there’s an interesting pattern few people talk about. It turns out that inventions often occur at the same time or almost the same time in multiple research groups. These inventions aren’t struck-by-lightning insights by a single scientist; they tend to be ideas that evolved and emerged in a research community for an extended … Read more
Especially during my time in industry, a common saying among my a-type, hard-driving colleagues was “I can sleep when I’m dead.” The idea communicated was that the things you’re now spending time on are so important that you’re willing to give up everything else. Especially young, ambitious people, for some reason mostly men, have this … Read more
One story that keeps fascinating me when it comes to science is how people in the early 20th century insisted on the existence of aether for transferring light. The general belief was that similar to how sound was mediated by air, there was another medium that would allow light to flow. This was important to … Read more
When I worked as a young professor in the 1990s, one of my main research areas was software architecture. The prevalent view at the time was that the architecture of a software system was virtually immutable once you had committed to it and consequently, you had to be very careful during the initial design phase. … Read more
In my own life, I notice that I’m increasingly aware of the things I like and think I’m good at and the things I don’t like and typically am not very good at either. Over the years, especially when I was younger, I tried a lot of things and, based on that, gravitated to what … Read more
Recently, I read a book by Oliver Burkeman entitled “4,000 weeks: time management for mortals.” The essence of the book is that as humans, we have 4,000 weeks in our lifespan. Of course, part of that is spent in our youth and another part in retirement, leaving us with about 2,000 weeks in our working … Read more
