Engineering
Software Architecture
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What You'll Learn
Learn Software Architecture with the Practica AI Coach
The Practica AI Coach helps you improve in Software Architecture by using your current work challenges as opportunities to improve. The AI Coach will ask you questions, instruct you on concepts and tactics, and give you feedback as you make progress.Intro to Software Architecture
Software architecture is the foundation of any software system and involves making design decisions that will impact the system's functionality, performance, and maintainability.- Software Architecture GuideMartin covers: • What is software architecture? • Why does it matter? • Application architecture • Enterprise architecture
Common Software Architecture Challenges
These are common challenges people face when gaining expertise in software architecture. Tackling these challenges head-on can help you learn this skill quicker.
I'm a Lead Software Architect at a fast-growing startup. As the team expands, we face challenges in maintaining a coherent software architecture. Different teams have been working on separate modules without following consistent design principles. This has resulted in a tangled and hard-to-maintain codebase. What should I do to establish guidelines and foster collaboration among teams to make sure we're setting ourselves up for scalability?I'm an engineering manager working on a critical project with a tight deadline. We need to integrate third-party APIs into our application, and the initial implementation is causing compatibility issues with our existing codebase. This is causing delays and making it difficult to meet project milestones. How can I balance leading an effective integration of external APIs, maintaining a flexible architecture for future changes, and delivering the project on time?Work on your own challenge with the Practica AI CoachHow to Think About Architecting Software
Effective software architecture requires a holistic approach that considers the system's context, stakeholders, requirements, and constraints. It involves identifying and prioritizing architectural drivers, creating architectural views, and communicating the architecture to stakeholders.- Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare YouJoel emphasizes the importance of solving useful problems, rather than fixating on interesting architectures.
Software Design Patterns
Software design patterns are reusable solutions to common software design problems. They provide a vocabulary for discussing design decisions and can help architects make informed choices about the system's structure and behavior.- Design PatternsAlexander covers: • What's a design pattern? • Benefits of design patterns • Catalog of 22 patterns • History of patterns • Criticism of patterns
- The SOLID Principles of Object-Oriented Programming Explained in Plain EnglishYigit provides a well-written breakdown of the SOLID principles: • The Single Responsibility Principle • The Open-Closed Principle • The Liskov Substitution Principle • The Interface Segregation Principle • The Dependency Inversion Principle
Architecting Systems for Scale
Architecting systems for scale involves designing systems that can handle increasing amounts of data, users, and traffic. This requires considering factors such as performance, scalability, availability, and fault tolerance.- Introduction to architecting systems for scaleWill documents some of the scalability architecture lessons he's learned while working on systems at Yahoo! and Digg, around load balancing, caching, off-line processing, and a platform layer.
Software Architecture Principles
Software architecture principles provide guidelines for designing software systems that are flexible, modular, maintainable, and scalable. These principles include separation of concerns, loose coupling, high cohesion, and modularity.- Meetup Architecture PrinciplesA VP of engineering describes Meetup's process of identifying their architecture principles: build for change, build for understanding, and build Meetup.
Software Architecture Examples
Software architecture examples demonstrate how software architecture principles and patterns can be applied in practice. Examples include the layered architecture pattern, the Microservices architecture pattern, and the event-driven architecture pattern.- Exploring Workday’s ArchitectureJames provides a big picture overview of Workday's architecture, and then digs into categories of detail including: • User Interface Services • Metadata-Driven Development • The Object Management Services • Integration Services • Persistence • Analytics • Deploying Workday • Operations
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