Apple IIc, Hubble and YouTube were born these days

On these days, tens years ago, a portable 3.4-kg (w/o display and power supply) Apple IIc got announced (April 24, 1984), Hubble telescope deployed (April 25, 1990), and first YouTube video was published (April 23, 2005).

Apple IIc (photo credit: Reini’s Computer Museum) Pillars of Creation (credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team)


  1. 7 behaviours to avoid in a software architecture role
    • Don’t ignore the engineering team
    • Don’t ignore the domain
    • Don’t prescribe or mandate architectures
    • Don’t just seek architectural consistency
    • Don’t forget about the current architectural state
    • Don’t get too attached to the desired architecture
    • Don’t let review processes stagnate
  2. How Complex Systems Fail. First things first: A complex system is at scale of a health system, not your 3 apps on 3 frontends talking to a bunch of microservices. It’s the Moon to the Sun scale or more. It’s hazardous, but heavily defended against failure, and require multiple factors to the catastrophe. There’s never a “root cause”, yet a disaster is all the time around the corner. Humans produce the failure and, and defend against it, even when they just gamble when they try fix it it.
  3. Digging deeper into xcbuild: Rules and Tasks. Something more technical, yet still not pure coding, but processes. The build system has tons of gems and secrets. Here’s one of them, perhaps the most useful: how to analyze what happened?
  4. Know your “One Job” and do it first plus the responses to common arguments against the post. Doesn’t matter on how many conferences you talk, or how many interviews you do (on short notice from HR), and it also doesn’t matter if you are recognizable on the local or global scene. It all doesn’t matter if you don’t do your “you had one job” task, your main target. The reason why you had been hired. Of course, you weren’t hired for one task, but that one is much more important than the others.
  5. Apple’s $64 billion-a-year App Store isn’t catching the most egregious scams. Surprisingly, one guy after hours caught more scammers than the wealthiest and very technically advanced company in the world. I’m sure he focused on his “one job”, but interesting question for me is: why Apple didn’t?