Just to be clear, I don't work for Facebook, I have no active engagements with Facebook, my story here is my own and does not necessarily represent that of IBM. I'd spent a little time at Facebook some time ago, I've talked with a few of its principal developers, and I've studied its architecture. That being said:

Facebook has a looming architectural governance challenge.

When I last visited the company, they had only a hundred of so developers, the bulk of whom fit cozily in one large war room. Honestly, it was little indistinguishable from a Really Nice college computer lab: nice work desks, great workstations, places where you could fuel up with caffeine and sugar. Dinner was served right there, so you never needed to leave. Were I a twenty-something with only a dog and a futon to my name, it would be been geek heaven. The code base at the time was, by my estimate, small enough that it was grokable, and the major functional bits were not so large and were sufficiently loosely coupled such that development could proceed along nearly independent threads of progress.

I'll reserve my opinions of Facebook's development and architectural maturity for now. But, I read with interest this article that reports that Facebook plans to double in size in the coming year.

Oh my, the changes they are a comin'.

Let's be clear, there are certain limited conditions under which the maxim "give me PHP and a place to stand, and I will move the world" holds true. Those conditions include having a) a modest code base b) with no legacy friction c) growth and acceptance and limited competition that masks inefficiencies, d) a hyper energetic, manically focused group of developers e) who all fit pretty much in the same room. Relax any of those constraints, and Developing Really Really Hard just doesn't cut it any more.

Consider: the moment you break a development organization across offices, you introduce communication and coordination challenges. Add the crossing of time zones, and unless you've got some governance in place, architectural rot will slowly creep in and the flaws in your development culture will be magnified. The subtly different development cultures that will evolve in each office will yield subtly different textures of code; it's kind of like the evolutionary drift on which Darwin reported. If your architecture is well-structure, well-syndicated, and well-governed, you can more easily split the work across groups; if your architecture is poorly-structured, held in the tribal memory of only a few, and ungoverned, then you can rely on heroics for a while, but that's unsustainable. Your heros will dig in, burn out, or cash out.

Just to be clear, I'm not picking on Facebook. What's happening here is a story that every group that's at the threshold of complexity must cross. If you are outsourcing to India or China or across the city, if you are growing your staff to the point where the important architectural decisions no longer will fit in One Guy's Head, if you no longer have the time to just rewrite everything, if your growing customer base grows increasingly intolerant of capricious changes, then, like it or not, you've got to inject more discipline.

Now, I'm not advocating extreme, high ceremony measures. As a start, there are some fundamentals that will go a long way: establish a well-instrumented and well-automated build and release system; use some collaboration tools that channel work but also allow for serendipitous connections; codify and syndicate the system's load bearing wells/architectural decisions; create a culture of patterns and refactoring.

Remind your developers that what they do, each of of them, is valued; remind your developers there is more to life than coding.

It will be interesting to watch how Facebook metabolizes this growth. Some organizations are successful in so doing; many are not. But I really do wish Facebook success. If they thought the past few years were interesting times, my message to them is that the really interesting times are only now beginning. And I hope they enjoy the journey.

Earlier this year, I conducted an archeological dig on Watson. I applied the techniques I've developed for the Handbook which involves the use of the UML, Philippe Kruchten's 4+1 View Model, and IBM's Rational Software Architect. The fruits of this work have proven to be useful as groups other than Watson's original developers begin to transform the Watson code base for use in other domains.

You can watch my presentation at IBM Innovate on How Watson Works here.

Over the past several years, I've immersed myself in the literature of the history and the implications of computing. All told, I've consumed over two hundred books, almost one hundred documentaries, and countless articles and websites - and I have a couple of hundred more books yet to metabolize. I've begun to name the resources I've studied here and so offer them up for your reading pleasure.

I've just begun to enter my collection of books - what you see there now at the time of this blog is just a small number of the books that currently surround me in my geek cave - so stay tuned as this list grows. If you have any particular favorites you think I should study, please let me know.

At one time, computing was a priesthood, then it became personal; now it is social, but it is becoming more human.

In the early days of modern computing - the 40s, 50s and 60s - computing was a priesthood. Only a few were allowed to commune directly with the machine; all others would give their punched card offerings to the anointed, who would in turn genuflect before their card readers and perform their rituals amid the flashing of lights, the clicking of relays, and the whirring of fans and motors. If the offering was well-received, the anointed would call the communicants forward and in solemn silence hand them printed manuscripts, whose signs and symbols would be studied with fevered brow.

But there arose in the world heretics, the Martin Luthers of computing, who demanded that those glass walls and raised floors be brought down. Most of these heretics cried out for reformation because they once had a personal revelation with a machine; from time to time, a secular individual was allowed full access to an otherwise sacred machine, and therein would experience an epiphany that it was the machines who should serve the individual, not the reverse. Their heresy spread organically until it became dogma. The computer was now personal.

But no computer is an island entire of itself; every computer is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. And so it passed that the computer, while still personal, became social, connected to other computers that were in turn connected to yet others, bringing along their users who delighted in the unexpected consequences of this network effect. We all became part of the web of computed humanity, able to weave our own personal threads in a way that added to this glorious tapestry whose patterns made manifest the noise and the glitter of a frantic global conversation.

It is as if we have created a universe, then as its creators, made the choice to step inside and live within it. And yet, though connected, we remain restless. We now strive to craft devices that amplify us, that look like us, that mimic our intelligence.

Dr. Jeffrey McKee has noted that "every species is a transitional species." It is indeed so; in the co-evolution of computing and humanity, both are in transition. It is no surprise, therefore, that we now turn to re-create computing in our own image, and in that journey we are equally transformed.

No matter what future we may envision, that future relies on software-intensive systems that have not yet been written.

You can now follow me on Twitter.

Steve Jobs. Dennis Ritchie. John McCarthy. Tony Sale.

These are men who - save for Steve Jobs - were little known outside the technical community, but without whom computing as we know it today would not be. Dennis created Unix and C; John invented Lisp; Tony continued the legacy of Bletchley Park, where Turing and others toiled in extreme secrecy but whose efforts shorted World War II by two years.

All pioneers of computing.

They will be missed.

This generation, this world, was graced with the brilliance of Steve Jobs, a man of integrity who irreversibly changed the nature of computing for the good. His passion for simplicity, elegance, and beauty - even in the invisible - was and is an inspiration for all software developers.

Quote of the day:

Almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Steve Jobs