swquinn

I was just going to post the same link. This is huge news.

This is pretty cool, seeing the Kalevala on HN. This book was in my childhood home all the time because of Finnish ancestry on my mother’s side and the fact that Eino Friberg [1] was my great uncle who wrote the 1988/1989 English translation. I have only browsed the contents of the book though. This reminded me that I should really take a look at it again!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eino_Friberg

We have several business organizations, oriented around different product offerings in the same service. So there is an organizational complexity that I think might lend itself to the architecture team being involved in contributing to, supporting, and executing a cohesive strategy across those products and organizations is another area where I've wanted to see us more involved. Unfortunately, it has been somewhat difficult positioning ourselves into a role where we can be proactive and lead rather than simply reactionary.

Yeah, that's a really good point. There is no "one-size fits all solution" to how an architecture team should be composed (if it should exist at all for a company) nor is there an easy answer for how it should operate.

I really like this though:

> software architecture is about making certain you have as few tools as possible, to do a job, with the flexibility to accommodate other tools, when necessary.

This really resonates--one thing I've noticed is a growing complexity of like-systems and finding ways to reduce unnecessary complexity seems like it could be very beneficial for any organization.

Interesting. The above is similar to what I've seen and experienced personally. One of the reasons I was able to move into my role was because of my technical experience but every member of our team has the same concern: the further away from the code we get the less effective we'll be at providing architectural advice for the systems as they evolve. It really is a bit of a catch 22.

Instead we've begun talking about focusing on ways we can support the technical strategy as well as the business strategy more.