MichaelCarducci
Michael Carducci spent years learning to see things as they actually are; first as a magician, then as a software architect, now as both simultaneously. And somehow that’s not even the whole story.
He’s the author of Mastering Software Architecture (Apress, 2025) and is currently writing The Semantic Layer (Packt, 2026). He has spent over 25 years following interesting problems; through roles from individual contributor to CTO and back again, across industries and continents.
As a speaker, he applies the same toolkit he uses in close-up magic: attention, misdirection, timing, storytelling, and the instinct to take the long way around when that’s where the truth lives. Audiences at hundreds of conferences across four continents have described his talks as the kind that change how you think about a problem rather than just what you know about it.
He also makes YouTube videos about technology and curiosity with his wife Kate, because some ideas are too important (or too interesting!) to leave only in conference rooms.
“Humans became behaviourally modern the moment they committed to **storing abstract information outside their brains.**” —Lyn Wadley As architects, we often bridge the gaps that exist between all of the teams and stakeholders involved in the success or failure of a system. Because of this, information is hitting us from every direction. How we capture, organize, distill, and express this information is critical to our own success or failure.
Integration, once a luxury, is now a necessity. Doing this well, however, continues to be elusive. Early attempts to build better distributed systems such as DCOM, CORBA, and SOAP were widely regarded as failures. Today the focus is on REST, RPC, and graphql style APIs. Which is best? The goto answer for architects is, of course, "it depends."
Mob Programming is a style of programming in which the entire team sits together and works on a single task at a time. Teams that have worked this way have found that many of the problems that plague normal development just melted away, possibly because communication and learning increases. Teams also find that the quality of their code increases. They find their capacity to create increases. However, the best part of all this is that teams end up being happier and more cohesive.
The difference between a junior and a senior dev isn't coding skills. A developer's coding skills are just their ante; necessary to get into the game but, like an ante, they only get you into the game.
Although the Resource-Oriented Architecture is one of the oldest and most successful distributed architectures, it remains poorly understood and often completely overlooked today. Much of the microservices architecture pattern is focused on taking applications apart although seemingly everyone has different ideas on how to put things back together again.
Zero fluff.