At the end of November last year I bumped into a blog which immediately captured my attention. I eagerly read during a few weeks after as the blog turned out to be a treasury of value =) Articles are nicely interconnected with each other, so it’s easy to fall into a rabbithole of great content there. The mighty author behind the Blog is Uwe Friedrichsen who I reached out to express my gratitude for the work done. Uwe also was happy with me providing a kind of overview of his blog for a newcomer as a page in my own blog. This makes sense as the amount of info in Uwe’s blog is pretty massive. Here we go together today!
Evolution of Markets & IT
Probably the key context to the rest of the Uwe’s articles is evolution of markets and corresponding IT evolution. We all experience the shift from industrial markets of the past to modern post-industrial markets. Industrial markets were all about producers closing eager demand from consumers for the stuff they did. Consumers were so desperate that for a producer the key activity was produce as much as fast as they can. Most of the modern managerial knowledge body was built by successful people operating in industrial markets. The efficiency is king there while effectiveness is long forgotten.
These two words sounds very similar but are very different. Per Uwe’s own words:
Effectiveness is about doing the right thing. Efficiency is about doing the thing right.
Effectiveness is king for post-industrial markets where goods are abundant and customers are picky. The ability to experiment quickly by delivering stuff in front of customers is crucial in this setup. In regards to IT it’s role moved from a mere cost center / back office into frontline of customer interaction & indispensable part of the business. Still many people involved don’t realize this change.
Hope that’s enough to spark some interest in checking out the great articles Uwe got on the topic!
Fallacies Covered in the Blog of Uwe Friedrichsen
Uwe did a great job of debunking a bunch of fallacies widespread in the industry. “Software – It’s not what you think it is” series covers generic misconceptions about software:
- Why the dream of making software devs replaceable like conveyor belt workstations is unlikely to become true
- Why every new wave of hype underdelivers on its promises to become “THE silver bullet”
- Why it is so hard to operate in a modern enterprise technology landscape
- Why you can’t write software once and capitalize on it forever
- Why software on the one hand is so hard to understand and talk about and on the other is so easy to change (or isn’t it? =))
Reusability has been a bliss & curse of the industry for a long time and blog of Uwe Friedrichsen covers why it’s so “bimodal” in a separate series. As with everything else I explicitly mention in this post it’s a must read from my perspective.
We all tried to harness the microservices beast – me included, so I have a couple of articles in my blog on implementation principles and possible motivation. Uwe got his own series about microservices which are much deeper dive than my works, so again I greatly recommend it. For instance, the approach I advocate for is just one possible approach which Uwe coined as “microliths”.
I also enjoyed “there’s no ACID” series as an example of reiteration on something which seems so basic and fundamental fostering Socrates “I know that I know nothing” =)
Legacy Systems and Evergrowing Complexity
“Legacy” is usually a synonym of something nasty in industry. However, such posture usually missing the whole picture what Uwe reminds us about: system becomes successful => successful system has to change often (check value preservation dilemma) => changes are introduced without proper discipline what leads to accidental complexity.
There’s probably the longest series in the blog (or at least the longest I read) which covers exactly that. “Simplify!” is all about evergrowing complexity, how to slice it into essential & accidental and deal with all that in a whole bunch of different contexts. Another totally must read & enjoy.
Raise of AI in the Blog of Uwe Friedrichsen
I will refer to just one series in this section but I decided it’s worth its own section – just because AI and especially GenAI is full of hype right now. There’s probably more than that in the blog of Uwe – AI appears in discussion on greenfield fallacy, for instance. But in particular “ChatGPT already knows” series is definitely worth reading now when people scream about AI from every teapot.
Is it a miracle? Is it a curse? Will it replace us all or just a few? What we can do without becoming luddites of the modern era? Uwe already got you covered =)
Where it All Goes
The latest blog series Uwe works on is “The long way towards resilience” – the most recent article was live on January 10th and I personally eagerly wait for the next one! An article from this series was the first I read in the Uwe’s blog – that was probably part 6 as it was reposted in some Telegram channel and catched up my interest. I do believe, however, that to see the series in its full glory it’s very helpful to read more of Uwe’s content first.
Anyways the series describes a really long way organizations should get through as they mature in delivering dependable software:
- At first you think you can avoid failures
- Then at some point you realize that failures are inevitable & you embrace the challenge
- Later you remember Socrates again as unknown unknowns hit you hard
- Only the hardest will become truly anti-fragile
For me getting through the blog was like a fresh air. With such technology leaders as Uwe (he’s a CTO now) we can at least hope that in time our industry will become a better place to be.