Welcome to the Lounge

author, Chapter 1

I’m not exactly sure when I became a software architect. I do remember the first time someone else called me one. We were at an important client meeting and someone asked a tough technical question. The project manager chimed in: “Michael is the architect on this project. He’ll dig in and send you an update by the end of the week.”

from the book

Architects partition (a fancy word for divide into pieces) the software system so they can develop a strategy for achieving quality attributes and other system requirements. For example, you might assign functional responsibilities by designing one component to register users and another to identify pictures of cats. Or you could assign different teams to develop different modules. Or you might split things that read data from things that write data so the software system will be more reliable, available, and scalable.

Partitioning a system is important not just because it lets you develop a strategy for achieving quality attributes. Smaller things are easier to reason about, easier to test, and easier to design. Of course, since you broke the system into pieces, you’ll also have to make sure everything can come back together again.