The Architecture of Open Source Applications

A lot of these might be organically grown more than planned in advanced. There's some survivor bias in picking some big open source project and copying its architecture, as if that was the reason for its success.

It's still interesting to look at, but more as a curiosity. Maybe some of those ideas might come in handy someday. But I wouldn't start learning these as super successful design pattern and start forcing them onto your next project.

The back story of this series is Greg Wilson's quest to elevate design thinking in software. Beautiful Code, the book, was also part of this quest.

Back story:

https://corecursive.com/beautiful-code-with-greg-wilson/

I read the first volume a long time ago and enjoyed the view into how these open source projects have been designed, and what "architecture" actually means in their context. I think sometimes it's about making them easy to extend from the outside (with add-ons and configuration files), and sometimes it's about minimizing the effort needed to extend them from the inside (by adding and refactoring code).

The architecture of explaining how open source applications are architected may need a revamping itself?

What might be useful is an approach of live collections that keep evolving / added to. Maybe some sort of extension of the Journal of Open Source Software [1] where authors focus purely on architectural aspects.

Having a classification (by technology, functionality etc.) would also make it easier to make the most out of this wonderful collection.

[1] https://joss.theoj.org/

These are some of my favorite books about software because of how they reveal a specific human mind at work. And they're the only ones that I felt effectively taught me about design. Having books list design patterns felt much less useful than having books walk the reader through looking at code and making decisions about which patterns to apply and where

I wish there would be more books in this series.

[2011]

Nice