Architecture, Cities, Movies

From Matt Webb’s notes from day two at the reboot7 conference, about my talk:

is it a mistake to use the word “software” architecture? the imageability of a city depends on its inhabitants. if all the inhabitants are novices, a different kind of city would be appropriate. if there are more experts, the city can be more complex because people can help each other out. you have to understand the developer knowledge and how they move through it, to architect software. you’re architecting a whole team, a whole system.

Great point. It also has to do with established conventions. A team that has worked together have a shared store of conventions to draw from in forming the architecture. Also, more architectural design patterns would help here.

In an email, Olle Jonsson asked what a quote of another filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, could mean for software architecture:

All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.

I answered: “Girl and a gun: a carrot and a stick—the poorer one remembers the architecture the more the dramaturgical tension builds. I see a Memento where a programmer completely lacking long-term memory tries to write code which everywhere conveys its context, such that every line of code suggests the whole and he therefore doesn’t have to remember.”