Tag Archives : systems engineering

Today is the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. As such, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on what Joe Shea taught me at MIT about designing large-scale systems and managing their successful “launch”…

Correct isolation of logic in your applications can enable them to “turn on a dime,” rapidly adapting to changing business rules and requirements. Placing logic in the wrong places can lead to spaghetti, long test cycles or (even worse) complete breakage of your data model. This is why “Isolation of Logic by Type” is an architecture principle I live by–even if many of my vendors do not…

Use of modularity and encapsulation if one of the most powerful approaches to scaling architecture (your ability to built it, your cost to operate it–AND the value you can obtain from it). Those enterprises who incorporate this into the DNA of their technology create “killer networks” that can used to generate enormous value…

A few weeks back, I shared an observation from one of AOL’s former CTO’s that the US Constitution was the best architecture document in history (my apologies to my colleagues from other countries). As we approach US Independence Day, I thought it would be appropriate to begin a series that presented the Architecture Constitution ten years ago and how I am still applying these key concepts five software generations later.

In the Web 2.0 world, members of your community can upload media from any platform. This creates a literal nightmare managing CODECs across platforms. In this post, I discuss why YouTube is a greater technological achievement than Hulu–even though I enjoy Hulu much more…

In the Web 1.0 world could use different approaches to scale static and dynamic data. This does not translate well into a Web 2.0 world where most content is dynamic (i.e., user-generated content) that can come from ANYWHERE…