Friday, June 4, 2010

"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be" John Wooden

John Wooden, the Wizard and West wood, passed away today. I imagine most of the readers of my blog probably do not know him, you can read all about him by visiting his official web site.

He was the embodiment of the word "coach", not only did he win 10 national championship (7 consecutive), he developed players and MEN.

I am a Big Ten guy and never cared much about Pac 10, but I learned about Wooden by leanring about his amazing basketball dynasty at UCLA - anyone who ever worked with young 20 year old programmers can appriciate what it takes to get them focus on a goal and develop the decipline to achive it - then I read his books and his favoriate maxims. And only then I truely appriciated why they call him "The Wizard".

Of course he was not a software architect, but what said about "...failure to change" should be on top of every architect's mind, he proved it by architecting a system that work flawlessly level in 12 different environments.  How many of us can create a system that works in 12 different environments?  

Yet again, make me convinced that the essence of architecture is about changing gracefully.

1 comments:

sri said...

Interesting that you are a John Wooden fan as well. One of his famous quotes I have admired is "Reputation is not what is important but character". Something he learnt from his father.

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