Agent-based modelling for epidemiology: EpiRust and BharatSim
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that epidemiology is incredibly complex: the millions of edge cases, what-ifs, and counterfactuals make modelling exceptionally difficult. One way of...
View ArticleXR in practice: the engineering challenges of extending reality
Extended Reality technology — XR — has had a lot of hype in recent years thanks to the concept of the metaverse. But bold visions of the future can obscure the reality of what engineers and...
View ArticleAcknowledging and addressing technical debt in startups and scale-ups
Technical debt is a ubiquitous problem in software engineering, yet its causes — and the potential ways to address it — are often context-specific, dependent on the challenges and goals of an...
View ArticleWhy full-stack testing matters
Although many books have been written on software testing over the years, Gayathri Mohan's Full-Stack Testing, released earlier this year with O'Reilly, is unique: by taking a comprehensive look at...
View ArticleExploring the Basal Cost of software
The “Basal Cost” of software is an idea from Eduardo Ferro Aldama. The term is borrowed from biology, where the "Basal Metabolic Rate" refers to the number of calories a human body burns just to...
View ArticleReckoning with the force of Conway's Law
While putting together this year's Technology Radar, Conway's Law — the idea that organizations are constrained to produce systems that mirror their communication structures — was the subject of a lot...
View ArticleRethinking software governance: Reflecting on the second edition of Building...
Building Evolutionary Architectures was published in 2017. In it, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons, Neal Ford and Pat Kua defined and developed the concept of “evolutionary architecture” and...
View ArticleWelcome to the fediverse: Exploring Mastodon, ActivityPub and beyond [Special]
For many who have been part of the recent migration of users from Twitter to Mastodon, their first encounters with the "fediverse" have been puzzling, even disorienting. Given a decade in which we've...
View ArticleLow-code/no-code platforms: The 10% trap and the limits of abstractions
Low-code and no-code development platforms have been heralded in recent years as a solution to engineering talent gaps and as a trend that will properly democratize technology, allowing even non-coders...
View ArticleData Mesh revisited
Data Mesh is one of the most powerful and widely-discussed concepts to emerge from Thoughtworks in recent years. As the world becomes increasingly aware of the risks and challenges data can pose — from...
View ArticleShifting left on accessibility
The issue of accessibility in relation to technology and software has gained increased attention in recent years. While few would disagree that it's important, it nevertheless remains something that is...
View ArticleTackling system complexity with domain-driven design
Despite the term being coined two decades ago by Eric Evans, domain-driven design has arguably become more relevant than ever in software engineering, thanks to the rise of cloud and highly complex...
View ArticleSix key technology trends for 2023
It's often said that technology moves quickly, but the decisions we make about it can have long-term consequences. That's why identifying these trends — and understanding what they mean — matters. At...
View ArticleHow to tackle friction between product and engineering in scale-ups
As an organization matures and grows, silos will inevitably emerge. That can pose problems, particularly in the relationship between product and engineering functions — friction can slow growth and...
View ArticleMy Thoughtworks journey: Rebecca Parsons
Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons has had a long and varied career in technology. Even before joining Thoughtworks in 1999, she completed a PhD, worked as a postdoc researcher at Los Alamos National...
View ArticleServerless in 2023
Serverless received significant attention when it first emerged in the middle of the 2010s. And although it has now entered the mainstream and is today used in a diverse range of scenarios and...
View ArticleInside India's Drug Discovery Hackathon
Covid-19 unleashed a wave of medical and pharmaceutical research and innovation across the world. In India, the government launched the Drug Discovery Hackathon, an initiative designed to bring...
View ArticleHow we put together the Technology Radar
The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is a snapshot of technologies and practices that the company believes the industry should be interested in, based on the actual experiences of Thoughtworkers working...
View ArticleThe weaponization of complexity
We often describe our high-tech and digitally mediated world as "complex" but we rarely spend much time considering how that complexity can be cleverly deployed as a means of duping or manipulating us....
View ArticleTinyML: Bringing machine learning to the edge
When we think about machine learning today we often think in terms of immense scale — large language models that require huge amounts of computational power, for example. But one of the most...
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