I’ve been really out of the loop lately (hurtling towards a code freeze has a tendency to do that to me), so one thing I did tonight was to catch up on my reading. I was reminded about the The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing as enumerated by Peter Deutsch (thanks, Kevin Burton):

Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.

1. The network is reliable
2. Latency is zero
3. Bandwidth is infinite
4. The network is secure
5. Topology doesn’t change
6. There is one administrator
7. Transport cost is zero
8. The network is homogeneous

It is a classic. I came across this before at some point in my career when working on one of several enterprise and Web products I’ve worked on. I’d like to say that I kept this in mind when architecting the initial concept of the Digipede Network; however, I didn’t really.

It must have been lurking in the back of my mind, though, because we score rather well. We get a 0. 0 for 8.

Update for Dan: This is like golf. A lower number is better.