97 Things

Yesterday marked the release date of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom From The Experts. In what I would consider a truly unique effort, the minds of over 40 architects from around the world were tapped to create a collection of software architecture principles they’ve developed while in the trenches. The idea for the book was the brainchild of Richard Monson-Haefel, esteemed author of Enterprise Java Beans (O’Reilly 2004) and J2EE Web Services (Addison-Wesley 2003). I first discovered the 97 Things project when I stumbled across a wiki where Richard was encouraging architects to submit axioms, the best of which would be selected for the book. All of the contributions are under the Creative Commons Attribution 3 license which is essentially open source for writing. I thought it was a cool idea for a book and submitted a few of my own ramblings. I really think the final result of the project turned out great. All of the contributions are still available on the wiki. There is some excellent advice that’s definitely worth checking out.