Software Architecture Superstream: Software Architecture Fundamentals

Neal Ford: Introduction (5 minutes) - 8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 3:00pm UTC/GMT

• Neal Ford welcomes you to the Software Architecture Superstream.

Andrew Harmel-Law and Diana Montalion: Architecture over Architects (45 minutes) - 8:05am PT | 11:05am ET | 3:05pm UTC/GMT

• Is architecture relevant if it doesn’t get shipped to production? How can architects help all the teams they're supposed to be helping without slowing them down, getting in their way, or making their lives harder? Andrew Harmel-Law and Diana Montalion explore the potential offered by a different mindset—one that tells a different story about the role of "architects" while bringing the practice of "architecture" to the fore—and explain how to implement this decision-making structure within your own organization. Join in to explore how everyone can contribute to architecture without things reducing to chaos, how this process could succeed or fail in your specific context, how to improve these ideas, and more.
• Andrew Harmel-Law is a highly enthusiastic, self-starting, and responsible tech principal. Andrew specializes in Java/JVM technologies, Agile delivery, build tools and automation, and domain-driven design. What motivates him is the production of large-scale software solutions, fulfilling complex client requirements, and he understands that people, tooling, architecture and process all have key roles to play in achieving this. Andrew has a passion for open source software and its communities. He enjoys sharing his experience as much as possible, in both his formal consulting engagements and through mentoring, blog posts, conferences, and open sourcing his code.
• Diana Montalion is cofounder of Mentrix Group, a consultancy providing enterprise systems architecture, technology strategy, and content systems development. She has 18+ years’ experience delivering initiatives, independently or as part of a professional services group, to clients including Stanford, the Gates Foundation, and Teach For All. If you’ve read the Economist, donated to Wikipedia, or contributed to the World Monuments Fund, you’ve interacted with systems that Diana helped to architect. She takes meeting notes with a fountain pen and is also an aspiring plant chef.

Ron Powell: CI/CD Benchmarks for High-performing Teams (Sponsored by CircleCI) (30 minutes) - 8:50am PT | 11:50am ET | 3:50pm UTC/GMT

• Software delivery has never been more critical to the success of businesses in every industry. It’s also never been more complex—and that complexity continues to grow. So how can engineering teams succeed? CircleCI examined 55 million data points from more than 44,000 organizations and 160,000 projects to help guide team development and software delivery decisions. Benchmarks from the report show that the highest-performing teams prioritize being in a state of deploy-readiness, deploy more often, and recover faster. Join Ron Powell, CircleCI’s head of insight and strategy, to hear findings from the report and explore key DevOps insights, practices, and metrics that can help your team build better software faster.
• Ron Powell has a background in space physics, having worked as a Cassini team member analyzing plasmas trapped in Saturn’s magnetosphere. He’s now a technical content marketing manager at CircleCI, producing content that enables developers to build, test, and deploy their projects faster. Previously, he was also a developer evangelist at Samsung, where he specialized in 360-degree video production and application development for virtual reality hardware, wearables, and the IoT.
• This session will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A in a breakout room. Stop by if you have more questions for Ron.
• Break (10 minutes)

Alex Jaimes: Scaling AI—Lessons Learned in Building Large-Scale Real-Time Platforms (45 minutes) - 9:30am PT | 12:30pm ET | 4:30pm UTC/GMT

• There are many opportunities to apply machine learning, whether as an individual developer or in an architecture. But how do you get started? Alex Jaimes offers an overview that separates fact from fiction, then shares processes you can use to find opportunities to apply ML in your own projects. Join in to understand where ML can have the biggest impact, learn how to avoid common pitfalls, discover why improvements in processes can significantly outweigh algorithmic improvements, and more as you examine data collection and quality definitions (e.g, for labeling), metrics, objective functions, overfitting, and the cost of different types of errors, among others. You’ll leave with a better grasp of how to apply ML in real-world scenarios, including how to choose the right algorithms for different tasks.
• Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes is Dataminr’s chief scientist and senior vice president of AI. His work focuses on mixing qualitative and quantitative methods to gain insights on user behavior for product innovation. Alex is a scientist and innovator with 15+ years of international experience in research leading to product impact at companies including Telefónica, Idiap-EPFL, Fuji Xerox, IBM, Siemens, and AT&T Bell Labs. Previously, Alex was head of R&D at DigitalOcean, CTO at AiCure, and director of research and video products at Yahoo, where he managed teams of scientists and engineers in New York, Sunnyvale, Bangalore, and Barcelona. He was also a visiting professor at KAIST. He’s published widely at top-tier conferences and is a frequent speaker at international academic and industry events.
• Break (5 minutes)

Clare Sudbery: Let's Stop Judging People For Their Ignorance (45 minutes) - 10:20am PT | 1:20pm ET | 5:20pm UTC/GMT

• We work in an industry where we judge one another constantly for the things we don’t know. And yet, there are a million different paths through software development. The skills you don’t need now are necessarily forgotten or delegated to someone else. And that’s fine. Join Clare Sudbery to find out how to escape this limiting mindset. Instead of judging others for their lack of knowledge, let’s help them to feel excited about all the new things they’ll discover. Instead of saying, “For God’s sake, you don’t know that?” let’s say, “Fantastic! Lucky you. You get to learn something. What can I do to help?”
• Clare Sudbery is an independent technical coach with 22 years of software engineering experience. She specializes in TDD, refactoring, and other XP practices. Before recently becoming a freelance technical coach, Clare worked at Made Tech and Thoughtworks. She abandoned IT 12 years ago to retrain as a high school math teacher…but quickly returned to software, gaining new energy via extreme programming. Up until very recently she led Made Tech’s academy program, coaching inexperienced engineers to learn on the job. Clare has a passion for helping underrepresented groups to flourish in tech. She hosts the acclaimed Making Tech Better podcast and publishes notes and scribbles at A Woman in Technology, Everything Clare Knows, and In Simple Terms.

Ori Saporta: Using AI to Refactor Aging Monoliths for the Cloud (Sponsored by vFunction) (30 minutes) 11:05am PT | 2:05pm ET | 6:05pm UTC/GMT

• Monoliths aren’t going away, yet manual efforts to modernize complex systems fail 80% of the time. Ori Saporta explains how to use AI and automation to address technical debt and efficiently refactor complex monolithic applications into microservices ready to be containerized and deployed to the cloud. Join in to explore new modernization techniques that leverage advances in static and dynamic analysis, AI, data science, and graph theory that you can put to work right away.
• Ori Saporta is cofounder and system architect at vFunction. Previously, Ori was the lead systems architect at WatchDox until its acquisition by BlackBerry, where he continued to serve in the role of distinguished systems architect. Before that, he was a systems architect in the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ technology unit, Unit 8200. Ori has both a BSc in computer engineering and an MSc in computer science from Tel Aviv University; his thesis covered testing and optimizing data-structure implementations under the RC11 memory model.
• This session will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A in a breakout room. Stop by if you have more questions for Ori.
• Break (5 minutes)

Mark Richards: Domain to Architecture Isomorphism (45 minutes) - 11:40am PT | 2:40pm ET | 6:40pm UTC/GMT

• Isomorphism is a mathematical term that determines if two structures are equal in shape. It’s derived from the Greek terms ísos (meaning “equal”) and morphe (meaning “form” or “shape”). Domain to architecture isomorphism determines how closely the problem you’re trying to solve (the domain or application) matches the architecture style you’re using (such as microservices, event-driven architecture, space-based architecture, and so on). Join Mark Richards to learn how this concept can help you determine if you’re using the right architecture style for your problem. You’ll explore the “shape” of various architecture styles, then dive into real-world examples to discover how to match the “shape” of a problem with the “shape” of an architecture.
• Mark Richards is an experienced hands-on software architect involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of microservices architectures, service-oriented architectures, and distributed systems. He's been in the software industry since 1983 and has significant experience and expertise in application, integration, and enterprise architecture. He's the author of numerous technical resources from O’Reilly, including Fundamentals of Software Architecture and Software Architecture: The Hard Parts (both with Neal Ford), several books on microservices, and the Software Architecture Fundamentals and Enterprise Messaging video course series, and was a contributing author to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know. A speaker and trainer, he’s given talks on a variety of enterprise-related technical topics at hundreds of conferences and user groups around the world.

Neal Ford: Closing Remarks (5 minutes) - 12:25pm PT | 3:25pm ET | 7:25pm UTC/GMT

• Neal Ford closes out today’s event.

Upcoming Software Architecture Superstream events:

Architecture Meets Data - November 30, 2022