Another day at a conference... Yesterday I heard Ron Tolido tell the story about this Mystery Winchester House of the Spirits in California. Apparently some Sarah, widow of Mr. Winchester (the one who made the improvements to the guns and made enormous wealth out of it), got haunted by the spirits of all the people killed by any winchester rifle. The only way for her not to be driven to madness (maybe a bit too late though) by these ghosts was to keep on extending the house with different rooms, side ways, traps and mysterious corridors to confuse them.(By the way, much of this reminded me of The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende).

The great move Ron made in his speach was to draw the parallel with software architecture and how it tends to be mysteriously extended as a defense mechanism from software engineers: saving them from madness inflicted by the ever haunting spirits of unsatisfied customers and end-users :-)

By some coincidence my talk at the conference went further onto the building parallel. I think my explanation of the ReST architecture style actually did get through and opened some eyes.

Interestingly Ron's point was that the times of top-down design and architectural complete building plans are over (and not to be returning) With the advent of grid computing, ever more bandwith and evolutions of the smart-dust kind he foresees the advent of biological-like computing systems where the overview and control factor will reach zero. Welcome Matrix :-)

*update* Another one of Ron's references: Play the game of simple things building up complex systems. (He had some biological examples as well: ant and bee colonies.)