Ruby Midwest 2011 - Keynote: Architecture the Lost Years by Robert Martin

What people said

SevenNation · 2022-10 · Strong recommendation

> Many people will argue that not using a framework means write everything yourself. This is a false dichotomy. We can use libraries and frameworks just fine. ... > But we should give them a clear, and well-isolated place in our project. ... There's an excellent, if older, presentation called "Architecture, the Lost Years" that addresses exactly this problem and gives very specific, actionable guidance on how to solve it: [VIDEO] But how to pull off this decoupling? The answer is both obvious and surprising. Define a boundary. On one side is the framework. On the other side is your code. Through the boundary, only dumb data structure can pass. JSON works. So do structs. So does XML. The point is that these are behaviorless blobs of data. This buys you a lot. You can run your application completely detached from the network, a database, and other expensive dependencies. So testing becomes much simpler and easier. And of course, you can replace the framework by writing new boundary code. The other big lesson has something to do with why frameworks get added to a project in the first place. When designing a system, the goal should be to defer major decisions for a long as possible. That's when the best information is available. Sometimes you can just defer until the point becomes moot, which is a major win. Reaching for a framework before being forced to do so sets up the kind of situation the author is talking about.

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catwell · 2018-10 · Strong recommendation

The talk that had the most influence on how I write software is Robert 'Uncle Bob' Martin's "Architecture: The Lost Years" [1]. Being a Ruby conference keynote, it helps if you know how Ruby on Rails works, but the lessons apply to all software. Another one would be "Let It Crash! The Erlang Approach to Building Reliable Services" by Brian Troutwine. [2] I don't know if you would call it "technical" but Brett Slatkin's talk on Cohort Analysis is something anyone interested in tools to analyze how our users behave should watch. [3] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]

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mpweiher · 2014-04 · Strong recommendation

Excellent riposte! Mine was going to be somewhat less polite :-) Can't stress enough that TDD is not about testing (sth. DHH, like many if not most critics gets wrong). It is about development and design. The fact that you get a pretty decent test suite out of it is a nice side effect. (Love me those side-effects, wouldn't want to program without 'em). I also find that whenever I skimp, it always comes back to bite me. And usually it was because I hadn't understood the problem-space well enough to write a proper test. That's one important part of TDD for me: I have to understand the requirements well enough to actually write a test for them. And the OP is also right in that Rails is a bad environment for TDD, as far as I can tell, because all the magic and auto-integration gets in the way and has to be laboriously stubbed/mocked etc. Maybe it's time the community got over Rails. (See also Uncle Bob's excellent architecture talk: [VIDEO] ).

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