Category: Architecture

Here in the Netherlands you do not decide how many cows you want and then go build a barn. It runs the other way around, and it is a little bit brutal process about it. Your land has a so called phosphate allowance. The manure rules, the nitrogen rules, the whole beloved circus of mestwetgeving,…

Every year around now I walk the fields before the first proper autumn storm rolls in off the sea. Not for anything romantic. The horses have leaned on something they were not supposed to lean on, and there is a post near the back fence that has been quietly rotting since spring. I know the…

We keep 10 chickens, well 9, because one has run off to hide somewhere and we only see her every couple of weeks. But they taught me something I keep dragging into work conversations where it does not obviously belong. We have raised a batch from eggs, got some chickens from neighbours, some migrated our…

You can buy a company’s code, its customers and its logo in an afternoon (well sort of, you know what I mean). What you cannot buy, is the reason any of it was built the way it was. Twice in my career I’ve watched a company buy another company mostly for a logo and the…

After I got back from camping and rediscovered that tap water is a miracle (last week’s story), I did the other summer ritual, I cleared out the barn. Which is how I ended up with a perfectly good wooden cabinet, a bicycle, and a box of tools I was never going to use again, and…

There is a fence near where I walk the dogs. It runs about fifteen meters along the edge of a field and then simply stops. It connects to nothing, it keeps nothing in and nothing out. On both sides is the same wet Dutch grass and the same indifferent sheep. For years I have looked…

Every architecture decision I make comes with a second document nobody asked for. Not the system diagram. The org chart the system will eventually force into existence. Most architecture reviews end after the first one. That is where I start asking uncomfortable questions. The question nobody puts on the agenda Before I sign off on…