A while back, Richard Monson-Haelfel was working on a presentation called "10 Things Every Software Architect Should Know", which was a great idea for a talk. To solicit ideas, he posted to several mailing lists where architect-types lurk about, and he got flooded with responses. I was one of the early contributors because I had been thinking about some of this stuff anyway at the time he posted the call. Richard liked the entries so much, he decided to put up a wiki through O'Reilly to publish all these little snippets of advice (or axioms). O'Reilly liked the results so much that they are considering making it a book, sort of like Beautiful Code, but with much shorter (and many more) axioms. I'm not sure where the magic number of 97 came from, but that seems like a reasonable number. The whole "About" story appears on the site, here.

Well, it's out of the shadows now. O'Reilly has moved the site to NearTime (a sparkly hosted wiki site) and it's now public here. Go visit: there is some incredibly good advice here, in little bite-sized chunks. I greatly enjoyed reading the site and soaking up some of the great advice, all derived from real-world slings and arrows. Kudos to Richard for seeing this through.