NathanielSchutta

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.

By now your organization has planted a flag in “the Cloud” and it up to you to figure out just what that means to your application portfolio. Should everything be a microservice? Wait, what *is* a microservices anyway? How do you deal with massively distributed applications? How can event storming fix the gap between your business problems and domain model?

Becoming a software architect is a longed-for career upgrade for many software developers. While the job title suggests a work day focused on technical decision-making, the reality is quite different. In this workshop, software architect Nathaniel Schutta constructs a real world job description in which communication trumps coding.

Becoming a software architect is a longed-for career upgrade for many software developers. While the job title suggests a work day focused on technical decision-making, the reality is quite different. In this workshop, software architect Nathaniel Schutta constructs a real world job description in which communication trumps coding.

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 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.

As we migrate towards distributed applications, it is more than just our architectures that are changing, so too are the structures of our teams. The Inverse Conway Maneuver tells us small, autonomous teams are needed to produce small, autonomous services. Architects are spread thin and can’t be involved with every decision. Today, we must empower our teams but we need to ensure our teams are making good choices. How do we do that? How do you put together a cohesive architecture around distributed teams?

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?

These days, you can’t swing a dry erase marker without hitting someone talking about microservices. Developers are studying Eric Evan’s prescient book Domain Driven Design. Teams are refactoring monolithic apps, looking for bounded contexts and defining a ubiquitous language. And while there have been countless articles, videos, and talks to help you convert to microservices, few have spent any appreciable time asking if a given application should be a microservice. In this talk, I will show you a set of factors you can apply to help you decide if something deserves to be a microservice or not. We’ll also look at what we need to do to maintain a healthy micro(services)biome.

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the software field, you’ve undoubtably found yourself in a (potentially heated) discussion about the merits of one technology, language or framework versus another. And while you may have enjoyed the technical debate, as software professionals, we owe it to our customers (as well as our future selves) to make good decisions when it comes to picking one technology over another.

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?