once the architecture has been agreed upon, it becomes very costly—for managerial and business reasons—to significantly modify it. This is one argument (among many) for analyzing the software architecture for a large system before settling on a specific choice.
The text compiles programming advice and principles, offering memorable rules and insights from various experts in software development, coding, debugging, performance optimization, user interfaces, and documentation.
Software architecture is a manifestation of the earliest design decisions about a system, and these early bindings carry enormous weight with respect to the system’s remaining development, its deployment, and its maintenance life. It is also the earliest point at which these important design decisions affecting the system can be scrutinized.
Decisions at all stages of the life cycle—from architectural design to coding and implementation and testing—affect system quality. Therefore, quality is not completely a function of an architectural design. But that’s where it starts.
In 2024, something shifted: AI-native apps started taking off. And we realized that our architecture was uniquely well-suited to power them. We leaned into agent-focused development, and within a few months, over 80% of databases were being created by AI agents rather than humans.