An architecture pattern is a reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software architecture within a specific context. However, lurking alongside these patterns are their dangerous counterparts—anti-patterns—that, while appealing in theory, can lead to costly and far-reaching consequences in practice.

Modern system design has entered a new era. It’s no longer enough to optimize for uptime and latency — today’s systems must also be AI-ready, token-efficient, trustworthy, and resilient. Whether building global-scale apps, powering recommendation engines, or integrating GenAI agents, architects need new skills and playbooks to design for scale, speed, and reliability.

This full-day workshop blends classic distributed systems knowledge with AI-native thinking. Through case studies, frameworks, and hands-on design sessions, you’ll learn to design systems that balance performance, cost, resilience, and truthfulness — and walk away with reusable templates you can apply to interviews and real-world architectures.

The hardest part of software architecture isn’t the technology, it’s the people. Every architecture lives or dies by its ability to influence behavior, build consensus, and turn vision into change. In this session, Michael Carducci explores the real work of being an architect: communicating clearly, guiding decisions, and driving meaningful change in complex organizations. Drawing from decades of experience and the principles behind the Tailor-Made Architecture Model, Carducci shows how to identify where change is needed, package ideas for adoption, and lead with both clarity and empathy.

Event-driven architecture (EDA) is a design principle in which the flow of a system’s operations is driven by the occurrence of events instead of direct communication between services or components. There are many reasons why EDA is a standard architecture for many moderate to large companies. It offers a history of events with the ability to rewind the ability to perform real-time data processing in a scalable and fault-tolerant way. It provides real-time extract-transform-load (ETL) capabilities to have near-instantaneous processing. EDA can be used with microservice architectures as the communication channel or any other architecture.

In this workshop, we will discuss the prevalent principles regarding EDA, and you will gain hands-on experience performing and running standard techniques.

AI models are evolving fast, but the systems around them aren’t. Every backend change still breaks your carefully tuned AI client, while on the web, every change to a server doesn’t require you to download a new browser. What if AI worked the same way?

Security problems empirically fall into two categories: bugs and flaws. Roughly half of the problems we encounter in the wild are bugs and about half are design flaws. A significant number of the bugs can be found through automated testing tools which frees you up to focus on the more pernicious design issues. 

 In addition to detecting the presence of common bugs as we have done with static analysis for years, however, we can also imagine automating the application of corrective refactoring. In this talk, I will discuss using OpenRewrite and the Moderne cli to fix common security issues and keep them from coming back.

Everyone’s talking about AI models, but almost no one is talking about the data architecture that makes them intelligent. Today’s AI systems are brittle because they lack context, semantics, and shared understanding. In this session, Michael Carducci explores how linked data, RDF, ontologies, and knowledge graphs solve the very problems that leave the industry floundering: hallucination, inconsistency, and lack of interoperability.

This workshop will explore the principles of the Ports and Adapters pattern (also called the Hexagonal Architecture) and demonstrate how to refactor legacy code or design new systems using this approach. You’ll learn how to organize your domain logic and move UI and infrastructure code into appropriate places within the architecture. The session will also cover practical refactoring techniques using IntelliJ and how to apply Domain Driven Design (DDD) principles to ensure your system is scalable, maintainable, and well-structured.

As software professionals, we deal with complexity and uncertainty on a daily basis. In fact, we are often masters at understanding all the various forms of systems complexity, and often are proficient at coherently communicating designs and solutions.

Unfortunately, within and amongst organizations, we set ourselves up as “the expert” – as prima donnas, if you will. Oftentimes, we set up unnecessary psychological competitions amongst peers, rather than treating peers and the wider software community as just that: collaborative and self-improving communities. Surely, there are better ways of working as a community and a society that promote individual and community growth, learning, and exponential improvement.

There's a clear need for security in the software systems that we build. The problem for most organizations is that they don't want to spend any money on it. Even if they did, they often have no idea how much to spend. No particular initiative is likely to imbue your system with “security”, but a strong, deep defensive approach is likely to give you a fighting chance of getting it right.

Web Security as applied to APIs in particular are an important part of the plan. In this workshop, we'll show you how approaches to defining “enough” as well as concrete techniques to employ incrementally in your designs.

In this workshop, we will pick a hands on framework for implementation, but the ideas will generally be standards-based and transcend technology choice so you should have a strategy for mapping the ideas into your own systems.