It's good to recognise our changing preferences as we move through the world of software engineering and use those moments to choose the right tool for the job. Sometimes we want to create, sometimes we want to retrench - perhaps refactor something, improve something, add more tests, change our architecture either subtly or fundamentally.

In the world of SaaS and open source, we have more than just language, cloud or platform choices. We have tool choices which can mean that we do less technical work and still deliver on our business goal. Therefore the landscape for potential change is much broader than we might think.

For example, if we want to host a website we can stand up a VM and install wordpress or ghost on it ourselves or we can pay someone to manage that for us. We can use Squarespace and their integrated sales platform or we can build a React website with integrated payment options with Stripe. If we think about our cloud provider, we don't have to use VMs, we can use serverless functions, step functions, microservices, containers implementing SaaS elements such as grafana. We have a myriad choices which impact how much complexity we need to manage and how we manage it. What might seem an overly complex solution from one angle, might be incredibly simple when viewed from the standpoint of how much infrastructure we need to manage ourselves.

Therefore our preferences have an enormous impact on our architectural choices and the skills we need as an individual or a team to support the architecture. There might also be associated costs, but they could go down as well as up.

So as a leader, a developer, and an architect you must keep playing, keep humble, keep experimenting, questioning and finding things out. One person will never know it all. It's vital to keep an open mind.

-- Richard

Photo by Abby Rurenko on Unsplash​

​An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management – Will Larsen​

Published on June 4, 2024

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