In a small village in the rural part of the Netherlands lived a simple carpenter. In his life he had only enjoyed the most basic education, having learned the job from his father who in turn had learned it from his father.

This carpenter had a most peculiar way of organising his work. Early in the m...

We find it so hard to cope with complexity in IT, that every time an evolving standard, like UML, is becoming too complex, we tend to drop it in favour of something new. The new being, because it is new, simple and understandable. While it lasts …

We see this with the rising popularity of Ruby. Deve...

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland has been a source of inspiration for me and many others concerning a specific aspect of complex systems. This aspect is one that in my view is essential if we want to realise the quantum leap in complexity that we need: reflection.

Reflect...

I know of only two infinitely scalable systems ever built.

One we know, and many people will correctly guess this when asked. It is the internet. The internet started up October 29, 1969 when the first two systems, located in Stanford University and the University of California, connected. Since then...

In his keynote speech on Oopsla 1997 (see link below) Alan Kay talked about the primary need for software development to deal with scalability.

We develop tools for making models (and software) that are very suitable to build dog houses. The misconception i...