New (April 4, 2025): Advice and checklist Do's and Don'ts in Technical Reports about Term and Thesis Projects for students and their advisors.
New (April 1, 2025): Partly satirical proposal for Novel Measurements for Academic Work (and Beyond?).
New (March 14, 2025): From analysis to synthesis: Messages from Practice to Academia, Part 3: Bridge Building and Topics of Interest.
New (March 3, 2025): Reasons for the research-practice gap identified in Messages from Practice to Academia, Part 2: Reasons for the Research-Practice Gap.
New (February 1, 2025): Journal column "Dear Researchers" with messages from practice to academia featured in Part 1 of a three-part article series.
New (December 11, 2024): Slides from SWIT presentation "Software Architecture @ 32: Responsible Decision Making or Prompt Engineering?" at CIT (PDF).
New (October 14, 2024): Slides for ITARC keynote "Timing Architectural Decisions" (PDF).
New (August 23, 2024): Open Source method/practice repository Ethical Software Engineering (ESE) Version 1.1 released on GitHub.
New (March 14, 2024): Slides from ETHICOMP 2024 featuring the Ethical Software Engineering (ESE) method (PDF). Peer-reviewed extended abstract (PDF).
New (January 15, 2024): Article series "API Design Pattern of the Week" (#apidpotw).
The site features stories, insights, and unsolicited advice from 25+ years on the road in software architecture land. Content comes in two forms:
- The blog "The Concerned Architect" targets practicing and aspiring software architects, anybody interested in API/microservice design patterns and technical writers of all kinds. All posts are listed by topic in this index and overview post. You can view the posts by topic tag.
- Additional pages collect papers/presentations, outline my professional services portfolio, point at other blogs and tell you more about me.
- (as a technical writer) How to Write Review-Friendly Articles discusses what reviewers expect, shares some techniques how to meet these expectations and provides pointers to deeper technical writing advice. The Authoring category contains all posts of this kind.
- (as a software architect) Architectural Decisions — The Making Of recaps how architectural decisions have been treated in the last three decades, features a lightweight decision capturing template and gives examples of good and bad justifications. Also available: AD Definition of Done and more.
- (as an API designer) Getting Started with Microservice API Patterns (MAP) explains the scope of our pattern language for API design and evolution and points you at starter material. From 2016 to 2022, MAP evolved into an Addison Wesley book: "Patterns for API Design: Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges":
Week 1: Wish List, Week 2: Pagination, Week 3: Error Report, Week 4: API Key, Week 5: Processing Resource, Week 6: Information Holder Resource, Week 7: Data Transfer Resource, Week 8: State Transition Operation, Week 9: Metadata Element, Week 10: Id Element. Week 11: Embedded Entity. Week 12: Linked Information Holder. Week 13: Conditional Request. Week 14: API Description, Week 15: Rate Limit, Week 16: Context Representation, Week 17: Version Identifier, Week 18: Two in Production, Week 19: Public API, Week 20: Retrieval Operation, Week 21: Service Level Agreement.
The book features these 21 patterns, and 23 more, in depth. Other topics that I am passionate — and opinionated — about include:
– Olaf (ZIO)
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