Simon Brown highlights the mismatch between architecture diagrams and real code. This talk is based on the “missing” chapter Simon contributed to Robert Martin’s Clean Architecture book. Simon describes different architectures (layered, by feature, port and adapter) with their advantages and drawbacks, and he also proposes a new one called “component architecture.” More importantly, he notes that when we look at these architectures, we mostly cannot distinguish one from another. He argues that there is a difference between code organization and encapsulation. We tend to organize code using file structures, but this does nothing for proper encapsulation because we overuse the public keyword—everything is accessible to everything else. Simon says that “The surface area of your internal public APIs should match your architectural intent”: we should use the packaging system of our languages (where available) to create real boundaries and keep private what was meant to be.
