The Difference Between Building SYSTEMS vs Building SOFTWARE

What is systems thinking, and why does it matter?

Diana Montalion, former principal systems architect at The Economist and Wikimedia Foundation, and author of "Learning Systems Thinking" talks to Dave about digital transformation challenges, building systems vs building software and more.

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#programming #developer #systemsthinking

[ronnie]

David, I am so glad to have found your channel at the very start of my software engineering journey. It feels like having secret knowledge that puts you way ahead of the game no matter where you are as a developer. I found your channel because I am naturally drawn to systems thinking. Your book "The Modern Software Engineer" gave me a lot of confidence by validating some of my intuitions about SD practices and applying the scientific method to programming. But I am very new, so my ideas are still forming even as I am just learning to code. I am a total novice, yet you have provided me with a mental model and practical methods it would've taken years, if not decades, to develop. You can't put a price on that. I can only say thank you and I promise to put it to good use!

[boomerau]

This is so painful to listen to having done systems thinking in 90's and thinking I just find the bad project not realising they are all bad. I don't know what they don't teach people but every digital transformation is filled with optimism and zero understanding of process - even after explained, demonstrated and repeated endless to the project team.

[jimhumelsine]

Paraphrasing Sam Newman: Building a microservice is easy. Building a system of microservices is hard.

Domain-Driven Design's Bounded Context has been a great aid in understanding services within systems, but to understand the systems, we need to consider the Context Map, which doesn't get as much attention as I feel it should.

Event Storming is also another was to try to understand the system too.

[Meower]

"Emergence." I ran across that word a year or so ago. It was in reference to cellular automata. But as we redesign stuff toward microservices which communicate with other microservices ... yes, emergence is the right word. The individual services may behave in a deterministic fashion but their interactions can push their overall behavior out of deterministic territory. Once you add the fallacies of distributed computing into the mix (hit Wikipedia for more details), which will apply to ANY networked services / applications, things start behaving much less deterministically. The more services you involve, the closer you get to the aforementioned cellular automata.

We genuinely stink at understanding, and anticipating, emergence.

[edgeeffect]

Now that Bullshit has a precise academic/philosophical definition thanks to Professor Harry Frankfurt... I'd have thought it no longer counted as a "bad word".

[muonneutrino]

Honestly this sounded like interviewing Kamala Harris

[PacificOtter-mgbi]

I defy anyone to identify a single useful, actionable thing she said. Really, just one.

[TusharRana-xj]

I don't want to sound rude, but, I always felt Diana was a bit sketchy. I've listened to her in a few interviews on the subject, but she never explained anything coherently. She often goes on a tangent and mixes everything up. I don't know whether it's struggling to explain stuff succinctly or lack of knowledge.

Even from the point of behavioral science, she keeps diverting questions, never looks straight, keeps rolling eyes to the sideways and so on. Maybe, it's just me who feels that way.

[gaby]

What I got from this video is that she wrote a book, then when asked 1 question, she convolutedly avoided to give a straight answer because it would have sounded too simple, and there would be no reason to write a book about it.

I guess she is talking about systems vs microservices (or micro systems) that interact with eachother to form … a system when you need it to. To me it sounds like she is suggesting to build stuff without a direction (a system has direction), and hope along the way that what you are building will come together and have meaning for someone to actually buy/use what you are building. 0 business logic

[Dankos]

I find it absolutely hilarious how certain people desperately try to justify their bloated titles and salaries. Building a system from off-the-shelf parts takes LESS effort and skill than building those parts. You are all as much of a "systems engineer" as I am while shopping at the grocery store.

[BeekuBird]

You have a typo in your description - should be Diana Montalion not Diana Montalton

[janfrank]

Wrong, this will lead nowhere. Systems thinking, like other approaches relies on the idea that a system is made up of interconnected parts. Unfortunately, the notion of a whole-part relationship is not based on the actuality of the system (spacial, physical, temporal, etc features) but on the structure by which our language organizes our thoughts about the system. A system has no structure, ergo the idea of composition and emergence is just a cognitive illusion that is sometimes helpful, sometimes not. Most importantly it can not cohesively be applied to the system itself, only to its representation.