Ubergeek is a strange and wonderful creature. He possesses supernatural powers for retaining vast swathes of detail in his head at one time. This makes him designed for coding, a priceless gem when you need to get version 1 of…
Blog Archives
The value of codebase structure
Most experienced engineers would accept that there are attributes of a code base under the heading of “structure” or “architecture”, that make a substantial difference to the ease of development. However, since there is some cost to improving these attributes,…
Introducing Levelized Structure Maps (LSM)
Levelized Structure Maps (LSM) are a new, intuitive way to visualize and manipulate software systems. Using LSM, large-scale refactoring to remove dependency tangles and other over-complexity, becomes second nature. LSM are the core of Restructure101. Items in the LSM are levelized…
Holarchy 101
Herbert Simon’s parable of the watchmakers was constructed to convey his belief that complex systems will evolve from simple systems much more rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms present in that evolutionary process than if they are not present.…
The parable of the two watchmakers
The parable of the two watchmakers was introduced by Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon to describe the complex relationship of subsystems and their larger wholes. There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus, who made very fine watches. The…
Beautiful Structure
In response to O’Reilly’s just-published Beautiful Code, Johnathan Edwards explains why he couldn’t go along with the premise. One sentence in his excellent piece stood out for me: “The human mind can not grasp the complexity of a moderately sized…
Posted in Structure
Complexity Debt – don’t “fix it”, “keep a lid on it”
So you just discovered that your code-base has racked up a whole load of complexity debt. This maybe explains why progress seems so painfully slow lately. You briefly think of suggesting a major complexity-reducing refactoring effort. This will delay the…
