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Applying the Web Dev Mindset to Dealing With Life Challenges

Editor’s note: This article is outside the typical range of topics we normally cover around here and touches on sensitive topics including recollections from an abusive marriage. It doesn’t delve into much detail about the abuse and ends on a positive note. Thanks to Lee for sharing his take on the intersection between life and web development and for allowing us to gain professional insights from his personal life.

When my dad was alive, he used to say that work and home life should exist in separate “watertight compartments.” I shouldn’t bring work home or my home life to work. There’s the quote misattributed to Mark Twain about a dad seeming to magically grow from a fool to a wise man in the few years it took the son to grow from a teen to an adult — but in my case, the older I get, the more I question my dad’s advice.

It’s easy to romanticize someone in death — but when my dad wasn’t busy yelling, gambling the rent money, or disappearing to another state, his presence was like an AI simulating a father, throwing around words that sounded like a thing to say from a dad, but not helpful if you stopped to think about his statements for more than a minute.

Let’s state the obvious: you shouldn’t do your personal life at work or work too much overtime when your family needs you. But you don’t need the watertight compartments metaphor to understand that. The way he unveiled it hinted at something more complicated and awful — it was as though he wanted me to have a split personality. I shouldn’t be a developer at home, especially around him because he couldn’t relate, since I got my programming genes from my mum. And he didn’t think I should pour too much of myself into my dev work. The grain of truth was that even if you love your job, it can’t love you back. Yet what I’m hooked on isn’t one job, but the power of code and language.

The lonely coder seems to free his mind at night.

Maybe my dad’s platitudinous advice to maintain a distance between my identity and my work would be practicable to a bricklayer or a president — but it’s poorly suited to someone whose brain is wired for web development. The job is so multidisciplinary it defies being put in a box you can leave at the office. That puzzle at work only makes sense because of a comment the person you love stated before bedtime about the usability of that mobile game they play. It turns out the app is a competitor to the next organization you join, as though the narrator of your life planted the earlier scene like a Chekov’s gun plot point, the relevance of which is revealed when you have that “a-ha” moment at work.

Meanwhile, existence is so online that as you try to unwind, you can’t unsee the matrix you helped create, even when it’s well past 5 [website] The user interface you are building wants you to be a psychologist, an artist, and a scientist. It demands the best of every part of you. The answer about implementing a complex user flow elegantly may only come to you in a dream.

Don’t feel too bad if it’s the wrong answer. Douglas Crockford believes it’s a miracle we can code at all. He postulates that the mystery of how the human brain can program when he sees no evolutionary basis is why we haven’t hit the singularity. If we understood how our brains create software, we could build an AI that can program well enough to make a program enhanced than itself. It could do that recursively till we have an AI smarter than us.

And yet so far the best we have is the likes of the aptly named Github Copilot. The branding captures that we haven’t hit the singularity so much as a duality, in which humanity hopefully harmonizes with what Noam Chomsky calls a “kind of super-autocomplete,” the same way autotune used right can make a good singer sound more effective, or it can make us all sound like the same robot. We can barely get our code working even now that we have all evolved into AI-augmented cyborgs, but we also can’t seem to switch off our dev mindset at will.

My dev brain has no “off” switch — is that a bug or a feature?

What if the ability to program represents a different category of intelligence than we can measure with IQ tests, similar to neurodivergence, which carries unique strengths and weaknesses? I once read a study in which the researchers devised a test that appeared to accurately predict which first-year computer science students would be able to learn to program. They concluded that an aptitude for programming correlates with a “comfort with meaninglessness.” The researchers stated that to write a program you have to “accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test, the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact.”.

The realization is dangerous, as both George Orwell and Philip K. Dick warned us. If you can control what words mean, you can control people and not just machines. If you have been swiping on Tinder and take a moment to sit with the feelings you associate with the phrases “swipe right” and “swipe left,” you find your emotional responses reveal that the app’s visual language has taught you what is good and what is bad. This recalls the scene in “Through the Looking-Glass,” in which Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that words mean what he wants them to mean. Humpty’s not the nicest dude. The Alice books can be interpreted as Dodgson’s critique of the Victorian education system which the author thought robbed children of their imagination, and Humpty makes his comments about language in a “scornful tone,” as though Alice should not only accept what he says, but she should know it without being told. To use a term that itself means different things to different people, Humpty is gaslighting Alice. At least he’s more transparent about it than modern gaslighters, and there’s a funny xkcd in which Alice uses Humpty’s logic against him to take all his possessions.

Perhaps the ability to shape reality by modifying the consensus on what words mean isn’t inherently good or bad, but in itself “meaningless,” just something that is true. It’s probably not a coincidence the person who coined the phrases “the map is not the territory” and “the word is not the thing” was an engineer. What we do with this knowledge depends on our moral compass, much like someone with a penchant for cutting people up could choose to be a surgeon or a serial killer.

For around seven years, I was with a person who was psychologically and physically abusive. Abuse boils down to violating boundaries to gain control. As awful as that was, I do not think the person was irrational. There is a natural appeal for human beings pushing boundaries to get what they want. Kids do that naturally, for example, and pushing boundaries by making CSS do things it doesn’t want to is the premise of my articles on CSS-Tricks. I try to create something positive with my impulse to exploit the rules, which I hope makes the world slightly more illuminated. However, to understand those who would do us harm, we must first accept that their core motivation meets a relatable human need, albeit in unacceptable ways.

It reminds me of the trope that cops and criminals share many personality traits. Everyone who works in technology shares the mindset that allows me to bend the meaning and assumptions within technology to my will, which is why the qualifiers of blackhat and whitehat exist. They are two sides of the same coin. However, the utility of applying the rule-bending mindset to life itself has been recognized in the popularization of the term “life hack.” Hopefully, we are whitehat life hackers. A life hack is like discovering emergent gameplay that is a logical if unexpected consequence of what occurs in nature. It’s a conscious form of human evolution.

If you’ve worked on a popular website, you will find a surprisingly high percentage of people follow the rules as long as you explain properly. Then again a large percentage will ignore the rules out of laziness or ignorance rather than malice. Then there are hackers and developers, who want to understand how the rules can be used to our advantage, or we are just curious what happens when we don’t follow the rules. When my seven-year-old does his online math, he sometimes deliberately enters the wrong answer, to see what animation triggers. This is a benign form of the hacker mentality — but now it’s time to talk about my experience with a lifehacker of the blackhat variety, who liked experimenting with my deepest insecurities because exploiting them served her purpose.

Verbal abuse is like a cross-site scripting attack.

William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Although I now share my life with a person who is kind, supportive, and fascinating, I’m arguably still trapped in the previous, abusive relationship, because I have children with that person. Sometimes you can’t control who you receive input from, but recognizing the potential for that input to be malicious and then taking control of how it is interpreted is how we defend against both cross-site scriptingand verbal abuse.

For example, my ex would input the word “stupid” and plenty of other names I can’t share on this blog. She would scream this into my consciousness again and again. It is just a word, like a malicious piece of JavaScript a user might save into your website. It’s a set of characters with no inherent meaning. The way you allow it to be interpreted does the damage. When the “stupid” script ran in my brain, it was laden with meanings and assumptions in the way I interpreted it, like a keyword in a high-level language that has been designed to represent a set of lower-level instructions:

Intelligence was conflated with my self-worth. I believed she would not say the hurtful things after her tearful promises not to say them again once she was aware it hurt me, as though she was not aware the first time. I felt trapped being called names because I believed the relationship was something I needed. I believed the input at face value that my actual intelligence was the issue, rather than the power my ex gained over me by generating the reaction she wanted from me by her saying one magic word.

Patching the vulnerabilities in your psyche.

My psychologist pointed out that the ex likely knew I was not stupid but the intent was to damage my self-worth to make me easy to control. To acknowledge my strengths would not achieve that. I also think my brand of intelligence isn’t the type she values. For instance, the strengths that make me capable of being a software engineer are invisible to my abuser. Ultimately it’s irrelevant whether she believed what she was shouting — because the purpose was the effect her words had, rather than their surface-level meaning. The vulnerability she exploited was that I treated her input as a first-class citizen, able to execute with the same privileges I had given to the scripts I had written for myself. Once I sanitized that input using therapy and self-hypnosis, I stopped allowing her malicious scripts to have the same importance as the scripts I had written for myself, because she didn’t deserve that privilege. The untruths about myself have lost their power — I can still review them like an inert block of JavaScript but they can’t hijack my self-worth.

Like Alice using Humpty Dumpty’s logic against him in the xkcd cartoon, I showed that if words inherently have no meaning, there is no reason I can’t reengineer myself so that my meanings for the words trump how the abuser wanted me to use them to hurt myself and make me question my reality. The sanitized version of the “stupid” script rewrites those statements to:

I want to hurt you. I want to get what I want from you. I want to lower your self-worth so you will believe I am more effective than you so you won’t leave.

When you translate it like that, it has nothing to do with actual intelligence, and I’m secure enough to jokingly call myself an idiot in my previous article. It’s not that I’m colluding with the ghost of my ex in putting myself down. Rather, it’s a way of permitting myself not to be perfect because somewhere in human fallibility lies our ability to achieve what a computer can’t. I once worked with a manager who when I had a bug would say, “That’s good, at least you know you’re not a robot.” Being an idiot makes what I’ve achieved with CSS seem more beautiful because I work around not just the limitations in technology, but also my limitations. Some people won’t like it, or won’t get it. I have made peace with that.

We never expose ourselves to needless risk, but we must stay in our lane, assuming malicious input will keep trying to find its way in. The motive for that input is the malicious user’s journey, not ours. We limit the attack surface and spend our energy understanding how to protect ourselves rather than dwelling on how malicious people shouldn’t attempt what they will attempt.

In my new relationship, there was a stage in which my partner mentioned that dating me was starting to feel like “a job interview that never ends” because I would endlessly vet her to avoid choosing someone who would hurt me again. The job interview analogy was sadly apt. I’ve had interviews in which the process maps out the scars from how the organization has previously inadvertently allowed negative forces to enter. The horror trope in which evil has to be invited reflects the truth that we unknowingly open our door to mistreatment and negativity.

My musings are not to be confused with victim blaming, but abusers can only abuse the power we give them. Therefore at some point, an interviewer may ask a question about what you would do with the power they are mulling handing you —and a web developer requires a lot of trust from a corporation. The interviewer will explain: “I ask because we’ve seen people do [X].” You can bet they are thinking of a specific person who did damage in the past. That knowledge might help you not to take the grilling personally. They probably didn’t give four interviews and an elaborate React coding challenge to the first few developers that helped get their corporation off the ground. However, at a different level of maturity, an organization or a person will evolve in what they need from a new person. We can’t hold that against them. Similar to a startup that only exists based on a bunch of ill-considered high-risk decisions, my relationship with my kids is more treasured than anything I own, and yet it all came from the worst mistake I ever made. My driver’s license unveiled I was 30 but emotionally, I was unqualified to make the right decision for my future self, much like if you review your code from a year ago, it’s a good sign if you question what kind of idiot wrote it.

As determined as I was not to repeat that kind of mistake, my partner’s point about seeming to perpetually interview her was this: no matter how much older and wiser we think we are, letting a new person into our lives is ultimately always a leap of faith, on both sides of the equation.

Releasing a website into the wild represents another kind of leap of faith — but if you imagine an air-gapped machine with the best website in the world sitting on it where no human can access it, that has less value than the most primitive contact form that delivers value to a handful of consumers. My gambling dad may have put his appetite for risk to poor use. But it’s significant to take calculated risks and trust that we can establish boundaries to limit the damage a bad actor can do, rather than kid ourselves that it’s possible to preempt risk entirely.

Hard things, you either survive them or you don’t. Getting security wrong can pose an existential threat to a corporation while compromising on psychological safety can pose an existential threat to a person. Yet there’s a reason “being vulnerable” is a positive phrase. When we create public-facing websites, it’s our job to balance the paradox of opening ourselves up to the world while doing everything to mitigate the risks. I decided to risk being vulnerable with you today because I hope it might help you see dev and life differently. So, I put aside the CodePens to get a little more personal, and if I’m right that front-end coding needs every part of your psyche to succeed, I hope you will permit dev to change your life, and your life experiences to change the way you do dev. I have faith that you’ll create something positive in both realms.

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Podcast: Facilitating Software Architecture with Andrew Harmel-Law

In this episode, Thomas Betts speaks with Andrew Harmel-Law about his new book, Facilitating Software Architecture: Empowering Teams to Make Architectural Decisions. The conversation includes a discussion of what constitutes an architecturally significant decision, how the practice of architecture is evolving, and how architects have a role to facilitate software architecture, rather than being the only ones making architectural decisions.

Thomas Betts: Hello and welcome to another episode of The InfoQ Podcast. Today I'm joined by Andrew Harmel-Law. He's a tech principal at ThoughtWorks, he's a trainer with O'Reilly, and most in recent times he's the author of Facilitating Software Architecture. Andrew was on the podcast a couple years ago talking about the architecture advice process, which is a core component of his book, so we'll get to that a little bit later. But Andrew, welcome back to the podcast.

Andrew Harmel-Law: Yes. Thanks for having me, Thomas. It's great to be back on.

What qualifies as an architecturally significant decision? [01:12].

Thomas Betts: So the book starts with the concept of making decisions. And you go into a little bit of analysis, and I think this is useful to talk about, what are key decisions and what are specifically architecturally significant decisions?

Andrew Harmel-Law: It came about because I was spending a lot of time... Because I'm a consultant, I get to go in and help people do software architecture. And I was realizing more and more as I was doing software architecture that the technology would change, the frameworks would change, the patterns would change or to a certain extent change. Lots of stuff would change, but there was a kind of fundamental thing that would underpin things and that was decisions, the investigation of a bunch of possibilities, and then the selecting of one of those things and moving forward.

And then I did a bit of research. Because it's the classic what is software architecture question, which I actually dodge in the book. But some of the classic quotes around about this and you get... There's a quote from Grady Booch, there's a great quote from Martin Fowler. And they would both talk about the fact that decisions are the thing that underpins software architecture.

I can't remember which one, but one of them says that your actual architecture is the sum of all of your decisions that have been taken either consciously or unconsciously through the life of a software system. And that's what gets you to where you are now, but it's also the environment in which you live. You live in the context of previous decisions.

So then I was looking at that and then that got me interested in the actual practice of making decisions and then I realized, which is what turned into the article, which then turned into the book, we talk a lot about the architectures, but we don't talk so much about the practice of getting to the decisions which pick microservices over a modular monolith or which pick Kafka and Kubernetes over. And so I realized that was probably something that worth thinking about and worth talking about.

Thomas Betts: Yes, I think architects love to say it depends, and that's where the role of being an architect doing the architecture comes in is what does it depend on and how do you do that analysis and what are your options?

Andrew Harmel-Law: And that's exactly it. And so then I was realizing that we have a bunch of things that we do where we realize... Because like you mentioned, the answer is it depends, but the question is what does it depend on? Lots of the work of architecture is figuring out what does it depend on, and that's where you bring all your expertise and all of these kind of things. And then I spent a little bit of time thinking that... I would talk about this out loud to colleagues, and they would say, "Is this an architectural decision? Is this an architectural decision?"

And I realized that while again there are some things that are written down about this, there's definitely not a even vague consensus on lots of things, what makes something architectural or an architectural decision and what makes it a significant architectural decision, [website], something that if you're an architect, you might want to focus on and spend time with as opposed to something which might be architectural but maybe isn't significant. So it's a way of, to begin with at least for myself, just to make sure that I was spending the right effort and attention in the right place at the right time.

Thomas Betts: So what are the attributes of those architecturally significant? How can we tell like, "Oh, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about this, but is that the best use of my time?" Where is the architect going to gain the most bang for the buck on the decision making?

Andrew Harmel-Law: There's the classic architectural decision records post. It's a long time ago anyway from Michael Nygard, I think it's called Documenting Architectural Decisions, where I believe they were introducing ADRs. Then Ruth Malan messaged me behind the scenes and pointed out that someone in the 1980s had talked about them, but Michael had written a blog which everyone read, including me. And in that he highlights a bunch of things which I thought were quite interesting and pulled out.

So there's decisions which affect the structure, and in that I would include placement of function. Where does this thing belong? Does it belong in that component over there? Does it belong in that component over there?

Things which define interfaces and dependencies, which are two sides to the same coin, but it's like things which I use and things with use me.

Things which affect cross-functional requirements, which is a ThoughtWorks term, which although everyone else calls non-functional requirements or systemic qualities or something. It's like the qualities we expect the system to have.

And the last one, which I like, which you don't see as much but I think is super key. So Michael Nygard's got construction technologies.

And again, I expanded that based on having spent too long working with certain ThoughtWorkers where if you're doing continuous deployment, I think if the only route to production is down some continuous deployment pathway and originating from source control, I think the choice of tooling on your pipeline, to quote a ThoughtWorker, I think it's Kief Morris, is if you're doing continuous deployment, your pipelines need to have the same availability as production because otherwise you can't fix stuff. So choosing technologies for that, that all feels like architecture.

And then for significance, I tried to identify and I go into great lengths of this in the book, I tried to identify what would make something a significant change to an interface. For example, on that one I realized that for me if it was going to make a minor version or a major version change using semantic versioning, that would be significant. If it's going to do a bug fixture, like a level three kind of change, I don't care. Someone else can worry about that kind of stuff. And so, for dependencies. If I'm going to select a new major minor version of something or if I'm going to choose something completely new.

Placement of function, what I did was I mentioned, typically if it's going to involve one of the classic patterns which we know about, and I list off a bunch of all of the classic reports where you think about things, if it's going to evolve an adoption of one of those, then that's probably relevant.

And then construction technologies again and CFRs, it was if it was going to have a material impact on those kind of things, then it was worth paying attention. But if someone's upgrading something to a minor version of something or whatever, then it's probably less relevant.

I did feel like I was stepping into the unknown a little bit, so I made sure I got lots of feedback about it, so I didn't want to arbitrarily make statements which people would then blindly follow, but it seems to resonated. It's written to be cut and pastable, I'm not sure O'Reilly like you cutting and pasting. But it's meant to be... You could cut and paste a bit of it and put it in your wiki and say, "This is what we're defining as significant", it's a pretty good starter for ten. And I used it on a few engagements with a few clients and I got some good feedback there around about clarity and things, so.

The goal is to help people focus their attention because the point of the book is there's decisions happening everywhere. It's a bit busy, so we need to make sure we're in the right place at the right time if we're doing architecture.

Building on five revolutions in software delivery [07:46].

Thomas Betts: Right, right. Time is usually the limiting factor of any architect being able to do everything. I want to go to that idea. You talked about having the CI/CD is the way we deploy software. We've talked about having platform systems and Team Topologies talks about having a platform team and those decisions. This makes a decision that makes it easy for teams to follow the golden road and get stuff done.

So yes, I can see how you make one of those choices. It's like, we're going to use this database or this storage technology or these servers and if you do that it's easy. But if you do something off that path, it gets more challenging. I think that having those pipelines gets to another idea you talked about in the book at the beginning that this is built on top of layers and layers of revolutions we've gone through with... I can't remember what they all were, but Agile and DevOps and maybe you have the list in front of you.

Andrew Harmel-Law: So yes, so the list I've got just a case. I called them revolutions and there's a footnote which points this out because I didn't want to pick a fight. The revolution term is like the things came along which reset us our practice in software delivery, which includes software architecture. It reset the standard way of doing things. So the Agile Manifesto, the point was we'd done a bunch of stuff, people had built software, but then the Agile Manifesto came and reset how we thought about focusing on running and testing code.

Then the cloud computing comes along and it's how you think about where your runtimes are and whether you own them. DevOps comes along, which is how you think about the running of the systems as opposed to just the building. Product thinking comes along and helps you think about when you factor in feedback. And then stream-aligned teams helps you focus on how you align the human beings to the work that needs to be done.

In every single step along the way, we're getting out of the way of the software. Someone has an idea and then that idea turns into software and is running somewhere in production. The key thing is to get as much as possible out of the way of that so you can then do the work, get the code into production and learn from the feedback. That was a big thing I realized. It's very easy to just put stuff in prod, but if you're not learning from all of these things.

Traditional software architecture decision making [09:52].

Thomas Betts: So if we go back to maybe an earlier point before those revolutions or somewhere along the line, how did you see software architecture decisions being made traditionally versus after all these revolutions have occurred?

Andrew Harmel-Law: So it was really interesting. So traditionally I saw them... And this was for valid reasons. Because software was hard and because multiple people were building it, you would see certain nominated people being responsible for deciding and therefore accountable for deciding, which is a good thing. So you want the big decisions, like I stated, the significant decisions, you want those to be made explicitly, ideally, and by people who are taking them seriously and putting the right level of effort into them. And you also want those people to be accountable for things.

Traditionally the way that we structured things was that it made sense because we weren't moving fast because maybe less of the revolutions had happened. So we would want the right people, typically middle-aged men of my description, and in some central place where they would do work. And it would appear... For so long, you'd get these memes coming up. So the ivory tower would be the first meme and there are problems with the ivory tower. So then rather than fundamentally changing how it's done, the people came from... And this is what I did a lot. You'd come down from the ivory tower and you'd work with teams.

The key thing which both of those shared, which I was experiencing problems with more and more, was the responsibility and accountability was still in a named, few people for valid reasons because you want people to be accountable and you want accountability for decisions, and therefore as the revolutions come along and everything else is speeding up. And working for ThoughtWorks, we would for many clients come in and make their software delivery go faster.

By doing that, as you know from systems thinking, if you speed up a bunch of stuff in the system, it just exposes another bottleneck. And I rapidly realized that I was... Me doing architectural deciding was a proper bottleneck. And the more ThoughtWorkers and clients moved faster, the more I was like, "Oh my god, there's more decisions coming my way because everything's faster and then I'm a bottleneck because there's more teams making decisions". It was untenable.

And I wondered if it was just me and me being incompetent, but the more people I spoke to I'm like, "Okay, this is a thing. Lots of people are trying to do the right thing, trying to do the right job, trying to make good decisions, but in the context of just more and more coming at them all the time". And that felt like that's the force, which is pushing this into an alternative-.

Option making and decision taking [12:16].

Thomas Betts: Right. So you called out two different variations, the ivory tower, just go over there and get your decision and it comes back, or this is an embedded architect, but it's still the person responsible for doing all of the work. I think you can talk about language a little bit. I liked how in the book you talked about option making and decision taking, decide what we can decide upon, what are the paths we can go and then make it. You talked about the accountability as the person accountable for the decision. That's the decision taking aspect. But I think you need to talk a little bit more about the option making, is a key aspect to that as well.

Andrew Harmel-Law: Yes, exactly. So I didn't realize this because I again, through privilege, I had access to these things because I've been part of them and I've been on projects and seen the making happen, the hard work of architecture. So the weighing up of the context and of the various options and the uncovering of the constraints, and then like you mentioned, figuring out what it depends on and then balancing those things and then using my expertise and knowledge of patterns and all this kind of stuff to figure out the right options.

But I realized that that's... Especially when it happened in the ivory tower. But to a certain extent when architects are down with teams, that would be something that was a bit of a magical trick people didn't realize because nobody was saying out loud what they were doing.

So they would do all of this hard work and draw diagrams on whiteboards and all of this kind of stuff, but that's the bit people would see. What they wouldn't see or wouldn't see explicitly, trade-off analysis, the pros and cons, the fact that there is no perfect option, the fact that there's always some downsides to the option that you select, there's always some upsides to the ones you ignore. And colleagues came to me over and over again and that's why.

The book is aimed at two audiences: stressed architects, who I've just described, and also lead developers who are like, "It feels like I could make some of these things. I could become an architect, move into architecture, but I don't know how".

And so narrating all of that kind of stuff around about like, "This is what we're doing, this is how I'm doing trade-off analysis. This is where my gut feel comes in, this is where it smells bad, I feel a bit uneasy about it". All of that kind of stuff, the softer stuff which just comes with experience. Putting all of that into things and acknowledging the fact that it's a creative act, it's not just like I go and do a bunch of research and then I do whatever's obvious. That felt crucial to say out loud. And hopefully have captured the intellectual aspects of it, but also the creative and the gut feel.

Architects need to communicate the “why” behind decisions [14:41].

Thomas Betts: And I think it's crucial to talk about that whole process and for people to see that process. The ivory tower meme, you don't see it. They're off from the tower, you don't see what's happening. All you see is that result. Here's the diagram, here's the architecture as if it's written in stone. And the interesting bits, at least to me is why? Why did you choose this and why did you not choose something else? We had these trade-offs, there were other options that had some very valid good points, but in the scheme of things, we had to trade them off.

When you have the people in the office and there's a whiteboard and everyone can get around, that's when it's easier for that lead developer to start doing the architecture. Maybe they're not working on the biggest architecturally significant decisions, they're not designing the platform, but maybe within their team they have decisions to be made and say, "Hey, I'm just trying to figure out how do I write this code? How do I structure these smaller interfaces, not the interface of the API?"

Andrew Harmel-Law: So there was three things that motivated the book. The third one is the famous Alberto Brandolini quote, which is like, "It's the developer's assumptions what gets into prod", and this is what pushed me over the edge. I was already stressed and then I realized that I might do an awesome job.

I might still be designing great architecture and making great architectural decisions, but if I fumbled the last bit, which is explaining it to the developers, or it just doesn't get into the heads of the people who are going to write the code, because it's not me writing the code because I'm too busy, then who knows what gets into prod. And it's the running architecture that's the real one. I can wave at Miro boards and murals and whiteboard pictures as much as I want, but if that's not what's gone into prod.

Thomas Betts: There's another quote and I can't trace it back, but the, "You always have an architecture, it's whether you explicitly decided what it was and the sum of all those decisions". Alberto Brandolini has a great quote. That's the insight. If you just give them one diagram, it's like, "Here's what you're supposed to do". What about the thing that's one layer down on the diagram that's not drawn?

Maybe you didn't do the full C4 analysis all the way down to the bottom and say, "Here's the code you're supposed to write" because you assumed anyone looking at this diagram is going to be able to interpret and make the decisions underneath that reflect that. But if they don't understand the why, then they might make something that looks the same as what that diagram does, but doesn't actually do the core thing you were trying to accomplish.

Andrew Harmel-Law: There's a great quote which didn't make it into the book, but it's from Domain-Driven Design, the Blue Book by Eric Evans. There is something around about taking whatever the design is down to the level of code and then trying to put it into code. We know that it's not just typing.

That wrestling with that level of detail will frequently fundamentally reframe your understanding of the problem, which might then completely change all of these things. And the realization that there's a feedback loop to the design, not just to the implementation all the way down from the code, again, terrified me. Because I was trying to be a hands-on architect, but the more of things were moving fast, the less I was going to be there.

Balancing the speed of responding with decentralization of decision rights [17:31].

Thomas Betts: That bottleneck you described, the, oh, once we made the system fast, we realized that I am the bottleneck. There's a great chart that you referred to a few times that has two axes and I think it's how fast you're able to respond and make a decision, and then also who has the ability to make that decision, who's in charge? And the ivory tower architect was one way on that. The hands-on architect was somewhere else. And you had different variations of who interacts with them. Can you describe what you were trying to accomplish with showing those... I know audio podcast, hard to see the axes.

Andrew Harmel-Law: It seems to be working quite well, although whenever I show it in... I've got a presentation where I talk about this bit explicitly, and so I always get feedback as to where I put the dots. But fundamentally, like you introduced, it takes a bunch of ways to decide, standard ways to decide in groups. So autocratic where you just one person says, like the ivory tower, "Do this". And the other end of the spectrum is consensus where everybody has to agree.

And so what I wanted to point out was there are pros and cons to both in the dynamic system of how we currently like to deliver software. So there are other pros and cons, but like you showcased, I've mentioned in a previous opening chapter, the forces I felt I was being subjected to, which were the five revolutions. So the goal is to get good decisions into production as quickly as possible into code.

What I did was I looked at the various ways of making decisions or making options and taking decisions and then evaluated them on these two criteria. Because you definitely want things to be fast because you want... If a team needs to push a feature and there needs to be some architecture done behind it, you want that decision to not block them. But also the fastest way to do it is for one person to have a think in the shower and just say, "Do it". But that's incredibly risky and nobody in the right minds, I don't think, would really do that very often.

So what you want to do is get the right people in the right minds on that thing with the right expertise, the people who know about the code, people who know about the infrastructure, the people who remember when we tried this 10 years ago and it blew up in our face. So therefore the other hypothesis is the more people you get involved, the improved the decision.

And then I pitched those two things together and realize that depending on if you have... The more people you have, the slower it goes because especially if it's consensus, there's always one person who doesn't agree or half agrees or whatever. And if it's autocratic, then one human being thinking really hard definitely isn't a good way to do software these days. So I pitched those. And then, this was the hook, which again, I got feedback from Rita, my editor, that I shouldn't bury.

The fact that it was one or the other was predicated on the classic you can have one thing, but you can't have both. But as they pointed out in Accelerate, the old story used to be you can't have high quality and frequent deployment. You can either have one or the other. And then Accelerate by Dr. Nicole Forsgren and co comes along, goes, "No, you can have both and it's probably good".

So my thing, and this is, like you mentioned, the fundamental part of the book, which is a very simple core, which is the architecture advice process, is you can have almost as fast as possible and almost as distributed decision-making as possible if you want to sacrifice some things, which I would argue in the book are less key if you're shipping code and iterating and getting feedback on it.

Facilitating software architecture with the architecture advice process [20:39].

Thomas Betts: This is where I wanted to get to the architecture advice process and I will make sure we have a link to the previous episode you were on and the article you wrote on Martin Fowler.

Andrew Harmel-Law: Yes, the article is the 8-page version of the 460-page book.

Thomas Betts: There's a lot of detail on that. So that's available if you don't have the book. But the architecture advice process goes to those premises that you're going to have the right people involved in the process, but they're not, as you expressed, the consensus. They're not all making the one agreed-upon decision because if you have 10 people in the room, you're going to have one person who holds up the entire thing. You can't go fast at that. So how do you avoid that situation? What does the advice process do differently than saying, "Oh, we're going to get everybody together to make a decision"?

Andrew Harmel-Law: This is the super smart part, which to be clear, I didn't come up with the architecture advice process, I just put the word architecture in front of it. There's a thing called the advice process, which comes from trust organizations and it is simple as anyone can make any decision, so therefore it's not anyone in the ivory tower, a team lead or whoever, could make a decision.

Typically, you'll end up with architects who look across teams deciding cross-team things, and teams or team leads deciding within-team things. So anyone can make a decision or make the options and take a decision provided, and there's two rules, they seek advice from those who'll be affected and those with expertise.

So those who'll be affected are... The way I take into explaining it is if your decision will make them put a story on their backlog. It means it's caused them work to do. And people with expertise are just classically the people who've got the war stories, are the people who you'd want to include, but they might not be the people who are affected. And it's incredibly simple, but it's incredibly powerful.

And that's what changes the practice of software architecture from the doing of it to the facilitating of it, which is where the title of the book comes from, because architecture is still key and the major fear is suddenly people who aren't well-practiced in architecture are going to be doing it, and the answer is yes. So therefore if you are an architect who is practiced to architecture, you can magnify your impact by making sure that the right advice is offered to the right people and making the right decisions in the right way.

The key point about advice is, like you mentioned, it's not permission. No one's giving permission or nobody's agreeing, they're just offering advice. And so the one thing I added to the standard advice process is if you were going to do only two things. You do the advice process and architecture decision records because you would write it down. Because if someone's writing it down, then it holds them accountable. And so that's like I stated.

Previously, there was responsibility and accountability for decisions was in one place. You still need responsibility and accountability to be there. And the open group in their Open Agile approach to architecture, O-AA framework, they maintain and that's still essential, but the key point they realize is that as long as accountability and responsibility move together, then that's fine.

So if I can decide and I'm accountable for the decision, that's good. So therefore it's a check to the reckless. I can't just randomly decide to do stuff like suddenly adopt Kotlin or Go even though the rest of the team are on C# or something because I'd have to write an ADR and I'd have all of the people in the comments on the ADR saying, "This is a terrible decision. It's completely against the strategic direction of everything we do. We have no developers with any of these skills, et cetera".

So whoever made the decision in the face of that advice would be a pretty brave person. Although it's interestingly, sometimes it lets people do the decisions which make more sense in reality because they've got information which everybody isn't party to.

Thomas Betts: And if you've been able to solicit that feedback, solicit those opinions, then you understand we made this decision in this case because of this reason. It wasn't just I chose out of the blue. Which goes to some of the... You mentioned Accelerate, but also those revolutions you talked about, Agile and cloud. Some of the arguments against them, the people who have done traditional waterfall things like, "Oh, it's going to be chaos. Everyone's going to be just deploying services left and right.

They're going to write in whatever language they want. Kotlin just exhibits up as a thing we have to support. And teams are going to do who knows what and we're going to lose control". As Accelerate has shown, you trade off, you make more specific control, but you put those guardrails in place. Let's make these significant decisions to help those people then be successful, not just let anarchy and chaos ensue.

Andrew Harmel-Law: Yes, Exactly. And this is what's interesting. So there's a bunch of stuff... Because just to your point, if anyone can do anything, how do we stay aligned? Because there's very few companies where one team is building a product, so you'll have more than one team and you all need to head in the same direction. Although as Diana Montalion points out, direction is a very linear way of thinking, and we're in a socio-technical systems world. But how do you know you're all headed for the same goal or the same outcome or whatever?

And that's interesting because then it places more emphasis on what we should be doing as architects on the tech strategy, which should be the guiding light. It puts more emphasis on platform teams. So we're not just building a platform because it's fun and we like building platforms. The platform, to take the classic Netflix approach, and Netflix, you could still use any language you wanted to write stuff, but Netflix are investing time and human resources in making certain languages and certain frameworks and certain ways of working.

So you can by all means go off and do your thing in your circumstances, but you'll have no support. You'll have to build your own pipelines, you'll have to build your own monitoring, you'll have to all of this stuff. But if you stay on the paved road, then you're good. But that means sometimes you want to go off the paved road, and teams do at Netflix and they get the benefits if they've done the cost-benefit analysis.

So that's why I like it, but like I expressed, there is a benefit to having more than one or two smart people thinking about things. Because it turns out most people are smart if you give them the opportunity to bring their expertise and things. And there'll be people who want to learn and to get smarter. So by doing this, deciding out in the open, like you expressed, the problem in the past was it was all hidden behind closed doors, there'll be this kind of people who aren't maybe necessarily confident enough to start deciding, but you will see people who are like, "I've got a strong opinion on that".

Or, as I learned from Rita, my editor again, will ask amazing questions. I spend lots of my time coaching people these days. They'll be like, "Oh, I don't know enough to say". I'm like, "But you could ask very good questions because your questions when you ask me behind the scenes are really good".

Because again, that goes back to this thing needs to be understood so it can be coded up and deployed and run. So making sure that things make sense to people and making sure that things are coherent and all of that kind of stuff, it helps. Things that are always been essential, like conceptual integrity and things, if you involve people and lift the lid on the option making, then suddenly things like conceptual integrity and all of those essential aspects become, in my experience, a lot more attainable.

Thomas Betts: So how do we get started with that? You mentioned people see these benefits, and it's one thing to say, "Hey, here's the advice process. Here's how we get all the people in the room". But I've done this with Agile and DevOps, getting companies to actually shift the mindset as opposed to, "I'm just going to spray on the we're doing Agile now because we have scrum masters, so we must be Agile". How do you actually make the transition to doing this effectively?

Andrew Harmel-Law: There's a bunch of suggestions in the book or advice in the book. Again, this was a thing where I learned a lot from Rita, my editor. I was very aware that if this book did become successful, which hopefully it does, it's telling people things that they need to hear or want to hear, I didn't want it to be a recipe book because otherwise you'd fall into the Agile trap, which is like, we're doing all the things, so we must be.

So what we ended up was there's the very core things, like I stated, which is basically do the advice process and write down ADRs, but then there's a lot of advice. So there's lots of advice, that's 400 of the 462 pages which are like, "Here are the things I have learned. Here are the things that are critical". A large chunk of that is adoption techniques and things that will probably trip you up.

The key thing I've learned is if you're someone who has the power to distribute your authority and accountability, then you can do that, but it makes sense to do it with one or two or three, a small amount of teams working on a similar piece of work just so the cognitive load doesn't blow up. But you can also do it, and I've done this with teams of clients before. It's a hard sell to say to an architect, especially a client architect. All these ThoughtWorkers are going to come along and maybe some of your people as well are going to come along and suddenly you are going to stop doing deciding, and they're going to do it? They'll be terrified.

But what we do instead is we model the process. So a team will do everything up to the point of deciding and even say, "We would make this decision if we were going to do it, but we acknowledge that that's not your process, so therefore we would like to propose to this, but we'll do whatever you tell us to do". And so that works really well because architects then realized that there's less and less that they have to do. I've had some really good feedback from an architect, the current client where I'm working, where they revealed, "These decisions are getting more effective and more effective. I don't even have to read them, I just trust the team now". And you're like, "Okay, this is good".

So they're moving towards rubber-stamping so they know that things are happening and then they're aware, and then... So they can slowly build the trust in the team and the team or teams can build their capabilities,. And that's quite nice. So you can either, like I say, you can give your power away if you have the power to decide, if you're an architect probably, and then mentor people, or teams can do it and then ask for feedback. And both of those work quite well. Things that definitely don't work well are when you go big bang because this is, like you expressed... You're pulling away a lot of... Like Agile if it's done properly or DevOps or cloud or whatever, you're removing a lot.

And what you want to do is not suddenly fill that space with more things, what you want to do is fill that space with the practice of architecture, which is now going to be happening in more places. So holding that space and especially if you're an architect, not rushing in to tell people what to do, or strongly suggest. It's very easy to think you've given everybody autonomy and accountability, and then realize that they just do everything that you tell them to do. Then you're not really scaling yourself, they're waiting for you to tell them what to do.

Thomas Betts: Right. You need to give them the tool so they're set up for success. You alluded to the idea of we're going to go with microservices because everybody's doing microservices, but we don't actually re-architect our system appropriately and we have a distributed monolith, and then we have networking problems that we didn't have before and we haven't actually fixed any of our core things and we're still tightly coupled and the teams can't move along. We got slower doing what was supposed to speed us up. I can see the same thing of, "Oh, we've our architecture decisions, we should be faster", or, "Maybe we're moving faster, but in the wrong way because now it's just..". Again, the chaos-ensuing scenario.

Andrew Harmel-Law: So people use the word anarchy sometimes. Technically it is anarchistic. If you read about political anarchy, it's a small scale implementation of anarcho-syndicalism. Or there's a bunch of work that was done in Norway and I think in English coalmines or something where they realized that the more self-management and self-sustainability you gave to teams, the more teams would do the right thing. So there are precedents for this, but chaos is definitely not what you want. While there are emergent properties from our distributed systems, I don't think you want to entice chaos into the mix. Just a little bit of decentralization.

Thomas Betts: It sounds like the advice for implementing this is similar to how I might roll out a new platform, a new CI/CD pipeline. You don't say everybody switches over and does this today, you experiment. Let's try with a few services that we think were a good example, and we find, "Oh, this does and doesn't work". And by the time we can ramp it up to more and more teams, we've figured out where the guardrails are, people are going to be successful. Similar for rolling out the advice process like, "Here's what we want to get to. That's our end goal. How do we try this out?"

Andrew Harmel-Law: Yes, exactly. I mentioned a space a minute ago. You clear out the space and then you're like, "Right, so that's the space where..". And I got this from Matthias Verraes who runs DDD Europe. He's like, "There's a space where architecture practice is happening. So you've cleared out that space". You mentioned guardrails. What you want to do is put in place as few as possible because you want as much of that space to be open as possible for creativity and people to design. So you clear out that space and then you're basically trying to protect the space and do it.

But what's interesting is culture is the thing that fills the space, and culture is good and bad. So what you want is a good form of architectural culture to fill that space, and you want it to be informed by the people who are doing the deciding, the systems that you've got in place at the moment, the technologies that everything is based on, the dynamics of the market, your individuals and all these kind of things. Because that's what's different. That's why I was trying not to be prescriptive in the book. Because those are so many things which mean you can't just cookie cutter and do exactly like someone else because it'll be different.

And I've done this with numerous clients. What is most exciting is how different this is because they always take things and do it differently. If you read the article, it sounds very chatty and very synchronous, and then we rolled it out at one client, and they're actually written up a case study on Martin Fowler's website as well, which we can put a link to.

So they were a blockchain banks, so obviously they were like, "We're very decentralized". They loved all the theory of it, but also they didn't want meetings. And I was like, "That's going to be problematic because I've got this heavy layer of human beings talking to each other". But they with their async culture figured out how to do it incredibly well using just written communication, which is now my default actually because it works so well.

Thomas Betts: The async or writing the ADR for making the decision process?

Andrew Harmel-Law: Yes, the whole thing. So now, which I don't think is even in the book, but now I'm more defaulting to... There's a thing called the Architecture Advice Forum, which is where you get together and people share things. It's less advice and more like notification because the advice is happening before, afterwards, in the gaps, asynchronously, in comments on the bottom of wiki pages or in pull requests or whatever. The richness of the communications that you see, and the fact...

There's always one or two people, like the experts who know about the old systems. They can scale superior because they can be in the right place at the right time. They can offer the right advice in the right context. Super powerful. As opposed to those people having to be in meetings for the entirety of their lives, it feels like a very useful way of using people's expertise and things, and they can refer to, "Please refer to my comment on this previous ADR and all this kind of stuff". As I stated three years ago over here, it's good. Works really well.

Thomas Betts: Fantastic stuff. Like I expressed, I highly recommend the book. I enjoyed talking to you a few years ago. I was looking forward to the book coming out. I learned a lot more. Things we talked about today, made me think about the practice of architecture in ways I really hadn't dived into, so I recommend people pick it up for that. If people need to reach out to you, Andrew, for any questions, how should they do that?

Andrew Harmel-Law: Questions are great and advice and feedback, which is good based on that's how the book's supposed to work, but they can find me on LinkedIn because I'm the only Andrew Harmel-Law on LinkedIn, or I'm on Bluesky, the only Andrew Harmel-Law on Bluesky. On Mastodon as well, I think as well. And again, Mastodon's a bit harder to find people.

But all of those things, plus a bunch of supporting stuff is on the website for the book, which is [website] If folks go over there, there's a free chapter they can download, which is Chapter 11, on how to make a tech radar. There's a load of other excerpts, there's some templates. There's a worked example of an ADR being written using the advice process. Loads of different stuff.

If people want to go there and ask questions. And I think that actually, I've don't know if anyone's used it yet, but there's a GitHub community site, so I'd love people to ask stuff there if they want to ask a question in public. Because this is the thing, I've collated a bunch of stuff from my experience and the experience of other people who've tried this. There are far more ways of doing this than just me.

One of the best things is somebody came to me and showcased, "I think I'm doing this, but I just had a different name". They arrived at the same approach from first principles, which means to me that it's probably more likely to be something. Because if other people can get to the same place without any knowledge of it, that means I haven't invented it, I've just glued a bunch of thoughts. So I'd love to hear people's thoughts.

Thomas Betts: Once again, Andrew Harmel-Law, thank you for being on The InfoQ Podcast.

Thomas Betts: Listeners, we hope you'll join us again soon for another episode.

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Investing in the Stack Exchange Network and the future of Stack Overflow

2024 was an exciting year at Stack Overflow. From the launch of new products and aspects that came directly from integrations with global partnerships to outlining our vision for Knowledge-as-a-service and the changing state of internet models. Hard to believe, but in many ways we have so much more to share in 2025.

As I closed out my last quarterly revision, I mentioned, “At Stack Overflow, we’re committed to our community, whether that be our public platform consumers, our end-consumers, partners, and Stackers, but we also deeply believe in building a future where our larger knowledge communities can thrive in the era of AI. An essential part of that mission is preserving the trust that our community has placed in us for 16 years, and that means continuing to invest back into our knowledge ecosystem.”.

“Investing” in Community is something we discussed a number of times over the past several years as we began our efforts to evaluate how Stack Overflow will evolve in the GenAI era. For some of you, I’m sure the question was raised: “Well, how exactly are you investing in the community?” I’m glad you asked.

Within the digital walls of Stack Overflow, we frequently say “Keep Community at Our Center.” And we mean that. This manifests itself in a number of ways, and one of those is our commitment to the high-quality, accurate library of knowledge built and maintained by the Stack Exchange Communities over the past sixteen years. For Stack Overflow and the larger Stack Exchange network to continue to grow and thrive, we must invest in ways to make it easier for new users to be able to contribute high-quality content. We also need to invite contributors—new ones and long-time, experienced ones—to contribute in new forms beyond just Q&A.

Over the course of the next year, we’ll be focused on ensuring our sites remain a go-to destination for our customers, including by modernizing the existing assets we have in place and also by introducing new capabilities and aspects that promote contribution from all types of customers. There is already a lot of experimentation at work on our team, and although we’ve tried to show previews where we can, we want to peel back the curtain and show you more.

The efforts we make and the new functions or products we unveil mean nothing if we aren’t involving community members—the true experts on how the product is used and the challenges it has. We need more community voices at the table, so we’re actively exploring ways to bring in more community perspectives and participation. In order to be an inclusive destination for everyone who wants to participate and consume content, we need a wide range of participants in our research and testing efforts. One of the ways to invite these new perspectives will be our first public AMA.

VP of Community Philippe Beaudette, Chief Product & Technology Officer Jody Bailey, and I will share our vision for new content types and how they will include the quality controls that have made Stack Overflow the trusted resource it is. We’ll also explore other opportunities for community members to edit, rate, and build new features collaboratively.

I hope you’ll join us live on Wednesday, February 26th at 3 pm ET via our YouTube channel (here) to hear our vision. We’ll answer as many questions as we can during the time we have together.

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