Introduction: IT Anti-Patterns

 I love collecting things. As a kid I was collecting napkins, stamps, bugs, minerals and seashells, which is kind of hard when growing up in a land-locked country. In first grade I have secretly sneaked my lizard collection to the classroom where they have escaped. In a Makarenko style Communist school system this was not a good thing, and I had to go to see the principal.

Kept the habit and at one time I had 8 unicycles, two ultra light airplanes, two sailboats and 6 vintage motorcycles, most of them “being restored”. My wife declared herself the world’s most patient spouse for good reasons. These days I am down on collecting physical things but still hoarding interesting thoughts and ideas and the corresponding books and URLs.

I was wondering about the habit of collecting.  What is the reason for the attraction? One of my theories is that the emerging patters from the “many of the same kind” reveal deeper meanings. Maybe the set of slightly different things profoundly please the ancient and powerful limbic brain, which has evolved to recognize and be pleased by patterns or by their unexpected alterations. (Thinking, Fast and Slow )

As an enterprise architect in a prestigious research institute part of my job is to encourage the use of good IT design and operational patterns. Also, more and more I am realizing that the identification, understanding and reduction of anti-patterns is equally important. The ways Information Technologies should NOT be designed, implemented, connected and operated. And the reasons technology should or should not be applied to “resolve” business problems.

This blog is all about IT anti-patterns, worst practices and information technology fallacies. These are the IT world’s four-leaf clovers, sinistral helix snails and albino gorillas. Snowflake the white gorilla was an outlier. Are the IT anti-patterns also rare? Are they more typical in government, academia or in the private sector? How about small companies or large enterprises, seasoned organization or startups?

I think IT anti-patterns are very common across all dimensions and when one begins to look for them and establishes a nomenclature and taxonomy, they start to become obvious and prolific. I hope with the help of the blog readers I can extend and refine my little collection.

Welcome to the AntipatternZoo

-Imre