I'm Christian Chicoine — solution architect and IT leader. I write about the decisions that define careers and cost companies millions, because someone should be honest about them.
Framework porn. Buzzword cycles. Architecture diagrams that look impressive and say nothing. The gap between what gets written about enterprise IT and what actually happens inside real organizations is enormous — and it costs real people real money. I try to write the content I needed and couldn't find.
Architecture is not a technical discipline. It's a political and organizational one that uses technical tools. The architects who understand this advance. The ones who don't spend their careers being right in rooms where it doesn't matter.
The failure modes in a retail ERP migration look remarkably like the failure modes in a financial services platform modernization. The org dynamics that kill a cloud transformation in manufacturing are identical to the ones that kill it in insurance. If you've only ever worked inside one industry, you can't see this. I've been lucky enough to see it across six.
I've watched SOA, ESB, big data, agile transformation, cloud-first, microservices, and now AI follow the same arc: breathless adoption, overclaiming, painful reckoning, eventual useful application. This doesn't mean new things aren't real. It means the right question is never "is this real?" but "is this the right time and the right application for us?"
Nobody makes a catastrophic architecture decision thinking it's catastrophic. They make it thinking it's clearly correct, and that the people raising concerns are being overly cautious or insufficiently visionary. Retrospective honesty about those moments is the most useful thing a practitioner can offer — and the rarest.
The knowledge I needed most in the first 15 years of my career was never in a book. It was in the head of some senior practitioner who had seen it before — and who either didn't have time to share it or assumed I'd figure it out myself.
A lot of that knowledge gets lost. People retire. Teams turn over. Organizations repeat the same expensive mistakes with slightly different technology and completely different confidence. The institutional memory of what actually happened — as opposed to what the post-project report said happened — almost never survives.
That's what I'm trying to fix, in a small way. Not with comprehensive frameworks or exhaustive guides. With honest accounts of what I've seen work, what I've seen fail, and the uncomfortable patterns that show up everywhere once you've been around long enough to recognize them.
If you're an architect, IT leader, or technical professional trying to navigate the difference between what the industry says you should do and what you should actually do — this is for you.