Speaker: Nate 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 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?

Of course communication is one of the most important jobs we have as an architect and models help us convey our ideas. While we can debate the usefulness of the full UML stack, 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 this workshop, we'll cover the gamut from fitness functions to diagrams!

These days, you can’t swing a dry-erase marker without hitting someone talking about microservices. Developers are studying Eric Evans’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. Nathaniel Schutta shows you a set of factors you can apply to help you decide if something deserves to be a microservice or not. You’ll also look at what you need to do to maintain a healthy micro(services)biome.