“Thoughts” are posts about what has been on my mind. Sometimes practical, sometimes not; often just things I read recently. Less thought out than regular posts.
I have had several discussions about how SSO should be priced by SaaS providers. On the one hand, making it prohibitively expensive weakens security for everyone, and there is a website about that. On the other hand, features that distinguish between business categories are often related to security and compliance (audit logs, SLAs, etc).
My personal position - and I do not speak for anyone here including my employer - is the following:
I often say SOA started to become mainstream when Jeff Bezos mandated it at Amazon around 2002, a story famously told by Steve Yegge. But Werner Vogels has shared a document that shows the move began in 1998 and was advocated by engineers.
The Manifesto already emphasized moving data to the process, hiding data models from clients, data consistency issues… A fascinated read, almost 25 years later.
This essay by Aaron Swartz is ten years old. A good time to read it again.
An organization is not just a pile of people, it’s also a set of structures. It’s almost like a machine made of men and women. […] True, sometimes you have the wrong gears and need to replace them, but more often you’re just using them in the wrong way. When there’s a problem, you shouldn’t get angry with the gears — you should fix the machine. […] You can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough.
Greg Wilson would like a journal of peer-reviewed summaries of research findings. No new results, just good explanations. Me too!