About
A small company, deliberately.
JD Software Architecture Analytics AB is a Swedish software development and consulting company working in software architecture, artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced software systems.
Why the company exists
There is a particular kind of problem that shows up in software organisations again and again: a system that works, that nobody wants to touch. Every change takes longer than the last. The people who understand it have left, or are too busy keeping it running to improve it. The proposed fix is usually a rewrite, and the rewrite usually fails.
These are analysable problems. They have causes that can be found, named and addressed incrementally. That analysis — and the engineering that follows from it — is what this company does.
Joakim Dahlstedt
The company is run by Joakim Dahlstedt, who works across software architecture, artificial intelligence and machine learning — both as a consultant to client organisations and as the engineer behind the company's own products.
The consulting work and the product work are not separate concerns. Building and shipping software directly is what keeps architectural advice honest: it is much harder to recommend something impractical when you are the one who has to live with it.
Principles
Say when you do not know. An unexamined guess delivered confidently is worse than an admission of uncertainty, because it removes the reason to go and check.
Measure before recommending. Performance and reliability problems rarely sit where intuition puts them. The cost of measuring first is almost always lower than the cost of optimising the wrong thing.
Prefer reversible decisions. Where a choice can be deferred cheaply, defer it. Where it cannot, write down what was decided and why, so it can be revisited when the constraints change.
Leave the team better off. An engagement that ends with knowledge walking out of the door has not really finished.