mike.mainguy

What does this even mean? It can mean a couple of things. From a technical perspective, the term originated from systems that had no display attached. So, for example, when setting up a data center, it might be necessary to have thousands of servers and having a monitor on every server led to a lot of redundant displays. Specifically, your database/web server really never needed a display because it's sole purpose was to service calls from the network. This also potentiall applies in the modern virtualized server world to provisioning new vms with a specific operating system image. The term "headless" in this situation indicates the server (virtual or not) has no display or keyboard attached and the only way to connect to it is via a network interface. An alternate definition, and where much noise is currently being made, is around a platform (like a content management system) that "traditionally" would serve up web content, but instead only serves ...

Designing for change I often get into discussions with architects that turn a little bit into "platform/language" shootouts. Moreover this can leak into business meetings where folks start to sound like elementary school students bragging about how "my dad can beat up your dad". The reality is, however, that the lifetime of a platform's relevance is roughly around 5 years....business (especially digital business) evolves and changes so rapidly that the cost to switch becomes an overarching theme when thinking about the "big picture". How I think about software platforms I'll call it the "mike system" how hard is it to get onboard? How hard will it be to get offboard in 3-5 years? Everything else (functionality, scalability, performance...) Why is onboarding ease important? Well, because if it takes 3 years to set up, you'll be on to your next platform before you can realize value from this one. Why is offboa...