97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

While I was away I’ve become a published author. I contributed to Richard Monson-Haefel’s project 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, out now via O’Reilly, there’s a great related project site here. You can buy the book from Amazon. It’s a bit of an ego boost to get one’s name included with such illustrious company as the other authors like Gregor Hohpe (and also to be described as an “expert” whose “wisdom” has been collected!). Personally I found it really hard to come up with an original axiom expressed eloquently enough to be satisfied with it – I only came up with a single axiom for the book and that was hard enough. Rather than hard-and-fast rules, I think you should think of the book as a collection of 97 personal koans that you can apply to your personal practice of software architecture.

There is a preview from O’Reilly here. There is also more background at Richard’s blog, at Burt Hufnagel’s blog and also discussion on The Server Side.

The content of the 97 things project is actually creative commons, and there’s more of these books in the works. It’s an interesting concept in open source collaborative publishing so lets hope it yields results.