The interviews are complete. Someone worked with the domain expert to create ontology.md. Six months later, a report counts the same Customer thrice, despite the model’s purpose to prevent this, and it hasn’t been updated since launch.
An ontology is useful only when used by a team. A software ontology is a shared model of a domain—its entities, attributes, and relationships written to…
Two senior engineers argued for an hour over a bug. The fix took ten minutes, but the argument lasted fifty. One meant “active subscription” when saying _customer_ , the other meant “any account.” Both were correct but lacked a shared model.
A software ontology is an explicit, agreed-upon domain model, including concepts, meanings, and relationships. In DDD, it covers ubiquitous language,…
Open a mature codebase and grep for Customer. In billing, it means an active, paid account; in support, anyone who has sent an email; in analytics, a deduplicated household. The bug isn’t in one module, but in three teams misunderstanding they’re referring to the same thing.
A software ontology is a clearly defined, shared model of a domain that includes concepts, meanings, and relationships,…
Your job as a software engineer in 2026 differs from 2020, beyond just using chat tools. Every system component, review queue, test runner, version control, release process, and on-call rotation must handle more load than they were designed for as demand continues to rise.
This article discusses AI’s impact on software engineering through the lens of software ecology, citing Adam Bender’s Google…
