Welcome!

Software architecture is the foundation on which awesome software is built. A great architecture alone isn’t enough to guarantee your software will be a smashing success, but the wrong architecture almost guarantees failure. Software architecture is so important that every software developer should know how to design it.

In this book, you’ll learn how to design great software architectures. Just to be clear, this isn’t a lesson in Ivory Tower, high-abstraction software design. You also won’t find any magic bean solutions—frameworks and technologies that magically solve any problem. You will learn how to apply essential design principles and practices, which will make you a stronger programmer, architect, and technical leader.

Designing great software requires more than mastery of principles and practices. How you go about designing a software system is just as important as the final result. In this book, you’ll learn how to use design thinking and human-centered methods to design software architectures collaboratively with your team. This approach to architecture design helps you forge a stronger connection between the design decisions you make and the humans affected by those decisions. Putting people first allows you to make better design decisions and, as a result, better software.