I just finished reading this book and decided to share my experience with it.
About the Book
Continuous Architecture in Practice is a sequel to Continuous Architecture both written by Murat Erder, Pierre Pureur, and Eion Woods. The authors attempt to address feedback from their 1st book by navigating the reader through the Trade Financs eXchange (TFX) case study.
The book starts with a brief introduction to the core concepts of Continuous Architecture, including its 6 principles, as well as its essential activities:
- Focus on quality attributes
- Drive architectural decisions
- Know your technical debt
- Implement feedback loops
From then on the book switches focus to common architectural concerns:
- Data
- Security
- Scalability
- Performance
- Resilience
- Emerging Technologies
Each concern is tackled in a separate chapter that features an introductory quote, a definition along with some historical context, a list of issues an someone should keep in mind when architecting for that concern, a list of tactics, and a further reading section.
My Opinion
Overall, I liked reading the book, it gave me a lot of inspiration and a desire to learn more about particular topics. The book assumes a certain level of familiarity with software engineering which helps it focus on general concerns and avoid implemention specific details.
I particularly liked the Emerging Technlogies chapter as it offers a healthy view on AI, ML, and shared ledgers. It helps remove the fairy dust that's blinding our industry, and instead focuses on meaningful changes that actually provide value to a product.
Also, as someone with experience in software security I appreciated the focus on shifting left security concerns.
Who Should Read This
In my opinion, every software engineer can benefit from reading this at some point in their career. However, I wouldn't recommend it to a junior, if you are not already familiar with the topics covered in the book it could be intemediating.
PS I am not affiliated with the book or its authors in any way. I am just a person that read a book they liked wanted to share my experience.
I can provide some context from Greece.
First of all, the unemployment rate is high. The official figure is currently at 12.5% but has been steadily decreasing from its peak of 27.7% in 2013. The real numbers are probably higher since people that haven't been employed within the last few years are not accounted.
As a result, labour rights are non-existent, overtime is rarely paid, wages have been stagnant since 2008, it is really common to work in unsafe conditions, and worker abuse occurs so often noone bats an eye.
While we do have unions more often than not they are powerless. For example, last year we had a major train accident (57 people died), the goverment blamed the train workers, their response was pretty much "our strikes for the safety issues that lead to the accident were deemed illegal, while our attempts to raise the issues were dismissed by the ministry of transportation".
We have had major nationwide protests with more than a million of people taking to the streets, but noone feels like that ever lead to anywhere.
IMO one of the greatest problems is the lack of information. Mainstream media are corrupt, and independent media are sabotaged or persecuted by the government. People do not know their rights, we have been trying to survive for so long that we cannot imagine a better future, and that allows employers to freely profit from laborers.
One interesting development is that lately more collectives are popping here and there, from coffee shops to softwafe development houses, more and more people are fed up and try to take matters on their own hands (even if in absolute numbers they are still very few).