Software Architecture Workshops
Katia Apium Academy was honored to be part of the Global Software Architecture Summit last year, an event organized by Apiumhub, the software development hub based in Barcelona. We had the pleasure of offering software architecture workshops to our clients and former students who attended GSAS.
Software Architecture Workshops by Leading Software Architects
Thinking Architecturally by Nathaniel Schutta
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, 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 web?
As architects, it is our responsibility to effectively guide our teams on the technology journey. Nathaniel discussed the value of trade-offs in this session, as well as how to evaluate new technologies and efficiently record the unavoidable architectural decisions we have to make. He also explored the value of fitness functions as a way of ensuring the decisions we make are actually reflected in the code base.
About the Expert
Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect who focuses on cloud computing and building usable applications. He is a seasoned speaker who regularly presents at conferences worldwide, including No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition, Nate is also an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages.
Nate co-authored the book “Presentation Patterns” with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough and recently published the book “Thinking Architecturally,” available as a free download from Pivotal. Nate’s presentations cover a variety of topics, from software architecture, microservices, cloud computing, and site reliability engineering, to everything in between.
Become a software design company by George Fairbanks & Michael Keeling
Software companies want to be good at software design, but the topic is complex and deadlines are pressing. George and Michael described activities, formats, cultural changes, and outrageous obstacles. They showed a journey by showing how to prepare and how to respond. The session was a mixture of small lectures, group exercises, storytelling, and group discussions.
About the Experts
Michael Keeling is a software engineer at Kiavi and the author of “Design It!: From Programmer to Software Architect.” Prior to joining Kiavi, he worked at IBM on the Watson Discovery Service and has experience with a variety of software systems, including service-oriented architectures, enterprise search systems, and even combat systems. Michael is an award-winning speaker and regularly participates in the architecture and agile communities. He holds a Master’s in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon.
George Fairbanks is a software engineer at Google. He is a software developer, consultant, educator, and speaker who’s been developing software since the mid-80s and teaching software design since the late 1990s. George has a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, advised by David Garlan and Bill Scherlis. He has publications on frameworks and software architecture in selective academic conferences, including OOPSLA and ICSE.
George has written production code for telephone switches, plugins for the Eclipse IDE, and everything for his own web dot-com startup. He wrote the book Just Enough Software Architecture and it’s been reviewed well. He’s also been a program committee member for the Working International Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA), the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), and the European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA). He’s been a referee for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) and IEEE Software.
Evolving organizations using sociotechnical architecture by João Rosa
“Change is the only constant in life.” You might recognize this phrase. The saying is from Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher. Organizations constantly evolve, sometimes with intention and other times to grab an opportunity. Often, those changes have side effects: they can affect people’s practices, teams’ missions, and organizations’ processes. Is there a way we can be prepared for such changes? From João’s experience, yes, we can be prepared for those changes! And we can use one of the oldest human skills: visualization. To be more specific, we can combine different visualizations to discuss, reason, and communicate change.
Disregarding your role in an organization; it is possible to use visualizations to discuss other points of view and the different options and trade-offs. This hands-on takes you through evolving an organization by using different visualizations such as Wardley Maps, Context Maps, and Team Topologies. João started with a Wardley Map to create the context for everyone and had a series of exercises to evolve organizations using other visualizations such as Context Map and Team Topologies. At the end of the session, João experienced different visualizations and combined them to visualize change and tame the brain.
About the Expert
João Rosa is a principal consultant and interim CTO. He believes software architecture is a fine balance between tradeoffs. João focuses on helping teams and organizations make strategic decisions regarding the software, aligning teams and software to optimize stream-based value. He believes in the power of collaboration and is a fan of visual collaboration tools. João often speaks at international conferences, one of them being the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference.
GSAS 2023: Software Architecture Workshops
This year, the Global Software Architecture Summit will take place on October 9–11. The first two days will be dedicated to talks and networking, and the third day to hands-on software architecture workshops such as:
- Building Distributed Systems using Transitional Sagas
- Designing a Modern Distributed System with EDA
- Nonlinear Thinking: Skills We Need Now
- Hands-on Visual Communication for Software Architecture
- Process Modelling EventStorming – A Rapid Hands-on Introduction
- Writing as Thinking
Experts in the industry, including Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Diana Montalion, Jacquie Read, Nick Tune, Daniel Selans, and many others, will be attending the event to share their knowledge and expertise with the software architecture community. Get your ticket now not to miss it. We hope to see you there on October 9-11 at the Axa Auditorium in Barcelona!
