Skydiving, Serendipity, and the Boxes We Build for Ourselves

In 2013, a few days before my birthday, I was running errands—the usual grind. I remember sitting in the parking lot of a bank, weighed down by a nagging thought: How should I celebrate?

Suddenly, I remembered something I’d always wanted to do: skydive.

My first reaction was the same as always: Someday I’ll do that.

But then I caught myself. When is “someday”? It’s not on any calendar I’ve ever owned.

At that moment, I realized I had no real excuse. I lived in a major metro area, certainly big enough to support a skydiving operation or two. I had disposable income from my work as a software architect and my nights and weekends gigging as a magician.

Why not today?

That thought—someday could be today—ended up being the genesis of a kind of rebirth. The day I discovered the difference between existing and living.

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Metaphysics and Software Architecture? Hear me out…

Suppose I roll a red ball across the floor.

Where did the redness come from?

Plato might say it comes from the abstract “Form of Redness.” Aristotle might argue it’s a property the ball possesses. Hume? He’d ask you to stop being weird and go touch some grass.

Now… where do architecture illities come from?

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Yesterday marked the conclusion of a whirlwind week in Bengaluru at the Great International Developer Summit. As I embark on my long journey home (30+ hours of travel) I am left both energized and humbled by all I have experienced.

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Why does it feel like so much of tech is just reinventing the same ideas every few years?

I have a theory…

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Software architecture was never easy, but today it feels more challenging than ever. Why? Because the role of the architect has evolved far beyond selecting patterns and designing systems—today, an architect must navigate complexity on multiple fronts simultaneously.

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My friend, mentor, and former boss, Robert Harris, recently posted about a novel approach he takes to making tech debt more tangible; he makes people fill out a credit slip whenever they take on tech debt. It’s worth reading his post (and giving him a follow).

As always, I have some thoughts on this topic…

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In Part I we explored the idea of AI agentic systems, current paths being explored, and the roadblocks present in those paths. If the API-driven approach is “too hard” and the browser-driven approach is “too soft” does there exist an approach that is “just right?”

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I’ve been designing and building data-driven & machine learning-enabled applications, on and off, for roughly 15 years. Although I was fortunate to have access to GPT3 about a year ahead of the mainstream, I was wholly unprepared for the wide-reaching impact of this technology. The introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022 brought into sharp focus just how impressive the current generation of large language models have become. The sheer breadth of zero-shot capabilities demonstrated by a single model has everyone’s minds racing. There is obviously immense power here, but how do we harness it to realize its true value and potential? That is the trillion-dollar question.

One of the most compelling visions for humanity’s next steps with AI is creating autonomous agents; AI systems that can do more than summarize text and provide plausible, information-shaped responses to our prompts. These are AI systems that can interact with other systems or the physical world. Although a great deal of R&D is underway as I write this, I’m shocked that one of the most promising solutions to the conundrum of how to achieve such agentic systems continues to fly under the radar…

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Welp, the final draft of my book, Mastering Software Architecture has been turned into the publisher. It is the culmination of nearly two years of active writing (~800 hours), countless hours of research, 156 citations, and 25+ years in industry.

Rather than write yet-another distillation of the current state of practice, I have tried to dramatically improve it. The model introduced in this work unifies our fragmented models in a way that solves real problems once thought by many to be intractable.

I’m proud of the result.

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You can be more than a label, or category. In fact, the breadth of your knowledge and experience is your superpower in whatever field you work.

Being a magician made me a better technologist, and my experience in the tech world made me a better magician.

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