Releasing the organizational fear of legacy code. Bringing together a maze of recent reading and listening and thinking. Zombie monoliths are hard to kill with or without fire. Organizations need to learn how to get good at migration.
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I listened to a couple recent podcasts interviewing Lorin Hochstein. He dropped a lot of wisdom, but a few things in particular stuck in my head. Organizations at some scale must cope with migrations but often neglect the learning that would let them get really good at migrations. This was reinforced after a visit to an old interview of Ward Cunningham. Make Migration Mundane
I attended StaffPlusLive last month. Laura Nolan's amazing talk offers a framework that addresses how to decide about migrations. To Kill It or Not Kill It With Fire?
Discussions at work lamented the disrepair of a software monolith—a story I've now heard at least five times. I asked for reflections from former coworkers. Migrating the monolith is hard. Zombie Monolith
Central to my current professional life, but a sidebar for this thread is Lorin's ideas for developing resilience engineering practice in reluctant organizations. Something I expect to come up at next weeks SRECon panel discussion. Sell Resilience to Leadership
All of this is swimming in recent memories of work with Kim Veltman and his own formative insight about history, civilization, and the human spirit. Shifting attention from preserving history to inspiring a culture of inclusion towards the monuments worth creating or sustaining. Civilization Not Monuments
The resilience engineering and thoughts about civilization are reaching for learning and adaptation, for the ounces of prevention to outmaneuver the constant change and finite resources.