Nathaniel Schutta

Building a Front end Pipeline

Tuesday, 5:00 PM EST

Back in the day, it used to be so simple. Our projects had a main.js file that contained a few hundred lines and every so often the corporate communication department would ship out some new CSS files. But now things are not quite so easy. With more and more single page apps containing thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of JavaScript, we're going to need a bigger boat.

In this talk I will explore various options you can deploy on your projects to tame the mass of code that lives on the front end of our applications. From NPM to Gulp to Webpack, this talk will help you establish a front end pipeline.

Building An Architecture Community

Tuesday, 8:30 PM EST

How is your architecture group perceived in your organization? Be honest now…is it seen as a group of ivory tower dilettantes intent on saying NO while filling a whiteboard with boxes and arrows? Or is it seen as a key component in developing rock solid software? If it's the former, how do you shift things towards the latter? Even if everyone thinks the world of the architecture team, odds are you have more work than you can handle and a bunch of tech leads that may (or may not) be thinking of all the right ilities. How do we reach out to them, mentor them, and bring them in to the fold?

Building an architectural community can help grow architects, improve the architect group's standing in the organization and ensure projects are built to last. This talk will discuss the steps one group took to grow a community of practicing architects, recognizing that not all those doing architecture work have “architect” in their job titles.

Production Hardened Services

Wednesday, 9:00 AM EST

By now I bet your company has hundreds, maybe thousands of services, heck you might even consider some of them micro is stature! And while many organizations have plowed headlong down this particular architectural path, your spidey sense might be tingling…how do we keep this ecosystem healthy?

In this talk, I will go beyond the buzzwords into the nitty gritty of actually succeeding with a service based architecture. We will cover the principles and practices that will make sure your systems are stable and resilient while allowing you to get a decent night's sleep!

An Architect's Guide to Site Reliability Engineering

Wednesday, 11:00 AM EST

Development teams often focus on getting code to production losing site of what comes after the design and build phase. But we must consider the full life cycle of our systems from inception to deployment through to sunset, a discipline many companies refer to as site reliability engineering.

While your organization may or may not have an SRE team, you have someone playing that role and we can all benefit from looking at the principles and practices that we can bring to bear on our projects. In this talk, I will introduce the concepts of SRE and how you can adopt these ideas on your applications.

Communication for Architects

Wednesday, 1:30 PM EST

At the end of the day, an architect's primary job is to communicate. Not only do we need to make sure our teams understand the design of the system well enough to implement it, we must be able to explain our decisions to an audience that isn't impressed with how many TLAs you can rattle off in one sentence. Successful architects need to seamlessly transition from in depth technical conversations to budget meetings to discussions with end users adjusting the message to fit the audience.

While oral communication is key, good architects also spend a good deal of time putting pixel to screen via email, IM and various architectural documents we're expected to create. We need to write clearly and concisely while also knowing when the best course of action is to pick up the phone or walk to someone's desk.

In this talk, we'll explore the various methods that we as architects use to communicate with our stakeholders. We'll talk about knowing our audience, being able to present as well as how to run a good meeting. We'll discuss various patterns (and antipatterns) of presenting along with some concrete advice on how to do it better. At the end of the day, our job is to tell effectively tell a story - this talk will look at ways to do that.

Reviewing Architectures

Wednesday, 3:15 PM EST

Good architects are, almost by definition, good story tellers. And while good communication skills are vital to success as an architect, so too is an ability to constructively critique an architecture. In this talk, we'll explore why reviews are important and what it takes to perform them well. Additionally, we'll talk about the importance of planning and preparation in conducting a successful review.

Good architects are, almost by definition, good story tellers. And while good communication skills are vital to success as an architect, so too is an ability to constructively critique an architecture. In this talk, we'll explore why reviews are important and what it takes to perform them well. Additionally, we'll talk about the importance of planning and preparation in conducting a successful review.

Thinking Architecturally

Thursday, 9:00 AM EST

Rich Hickey once said programmers know the benefits of everything and the trade offs of nothing…an approach that can lead a project down a path of frustrated developers and unhappy customers. As architects though, we must consider the trade offs of every new library, language, pattern or approach and quickly make decisions often with incomplete information. How should we think about the inevitable technology choices we have to make on a project? How do we balance competing agendas? How do we keep our team happy and excited without chasing every new thing that someone finds on the inner webs?

As architects it is our responsibility to effectively guide our teams on the technology journey. In this talk I will outline the importance of trade offs, how we can analyze new technologies and how we can effectively capture the inevitable architectural decisions we will make. I will also explore the value of fitness functions as a way of ensuring the decisions we make are actually reflected in the code base.

Architecting for the ilities

Thursday, 10:45 AM EST

As a developer, your focus was squarely on the “functional requirements” aka the business capabilities your application must meet. But once you step in the architect role, you discover a world inhabited by “the ilities” otherwise known as the non functional or quality attributes of a software system. But how do we know which ilities matter and which ones don't? And much as we may want to turn every knob up to 11, many ilities are inversely related - maximize one and you by definition minimize another.

In this talk we will look at various architectural problems giving participants opportunities to try and balance non functional requirements. We'll discuss the consequences of various approaches as well as how we can best document the inevitable decisions we arrive at.

Modeling for Architects

Thursday, 1:30 PM EST

In some organizations, architects are dismissed as people that draw box and arrow diagrams - the dreaded whiteboard architect. While we don't want to foster that stereotype, it is important for an architect to be able to construct basic architectural diagrams. An architect must also be able to separate the wheat from the chaff eliminating those models that don't help tell the story while fully leveraging those that do.

In this workshop, we'll discuss the various diagrams at our disposal. We'll walk through a case study and as we go, we'll construct a set of diagrams that will help us effectively communicate our design. We'll talk about stakeholders and who might benefit from each typ of diagram. Additionally we'll discuss how to constructively review an architectural model.

Modeling for Architects

Thursday, 3:15 PM EST

In some organizations, architects are dismissed as people that draw box and arrow diagrams - the dreaded whiteboard architect. While we don't want to foster that stereotype, it is important for an architect to be able to construct basic architectural diagrams. An architect must also be able to separate the wheat from the chaff eliminating those models that don't help tell the story while fully leveraging those that do.

In this workshop, we'll discuss the various diagrams at our disposal. We'll walk through a case study and as we go, we'll construct a set of diagrams that will help us effectively communicate our design. We'll talk about stakeholders and who might benefit from each typ of diagram. Additionally we'll discuss how to constructively review an architectural model.