Fundamentals sessions

Valentina Rodriquez shares a manifest describing a set of principles to design high-quality architectures. If you're planning to change your career or just want to improve your architect skills, join in. Read more.

A web API, like a website, is a channel into your business domain. Because of its simplicity, REST is the de facto standard for developing web APIs. But translating complex domain behavior to simple REST concepts is not straightforward. Tom Hofte and Marco van der Linden discuss RESTful resource modeling and share practical solutions to bridge the gap between a domain model and a RESTful API. Read more.

As architects, it is our responsibility to effectively guide our teams on the technology journey. Nathaniel Schutta outlines the importance of trade-offs, how we can analyze new technologies, and how we can effectively capture the inevitable architectural decisions we'll make. Read more.

Modern observability tools offer so much to help keep fresh code, well, fresh. That's great news for greenfield code, but most code sooner or later succumbs to the woes of time and team churn. How do you apply observability to code that hasn't been instrumented since day one? Isobel Redelmeier explains how to use observability to refactor old code. Read more.

Communicating (about) architecture to non-IT/business stakeholders is a valuable skill for architects. After all, many architectural-relevant decisions are made by others, so they need to be informed with clear, honest, intelligible, and actionable information/advice. Jochem Schulenklopper shows theory, examples, and useful tips on eight different facets of visual communication of architecture. Read more.

Architecture standards change in months, not years, bringing new capabilities, but taking advantage of them requires constant monitoring and tight feedback loops. We’ve embraced continuous delivery, but how do we enable continuous evolution? Paula Paul and Cassandra Shum explore architecture as code as a means to enable continuous evolution. Read more.

Often microservices and bounded contexts are considered to be the same thing. They are not. Vladik Khononov identifies the difference between microservices and bounded contexts, provides heuristics when each pattern should be used, and shares his experience optimizing microservices-quotebased architectures at Naxex. Read more.

While most of us think our software designs are based in rational, logical thought, the truth is much scarier. Ian Varley covers the emerging field of cognitive biases—bugs in our mental operating system—and takes a cold, hard look at how these mental blind spots defeat our attempts to build systems that serve our users and stand the test of time. Read more.

Software metrics can be used effectively to judge the maintainability and architectural quality of a code base. Even more importantly, they can be used as canaries in a coal mine to warn early about dangerous accumulations of architectural and technical debt. Alexander von Zitzewitz outlines key metrics that every architect should know and shares a new metric to measure software maintainability. Read more.

Every software system has an architecture. Many are little more than the result of circumstances, rather than deliberate decisions. Helping teams think about software architecture is a key to helping them grow well. James Thompson demonstrates how to assess approaches and make decisions based on what matters to your team and your projects. Read more.

We have a choice in designing our careers: follow the path of a technologist, exploiting a tech, or become a computational thinker who can address a much broader set of problems. Sarah Aslanifar compares the human mind to a computer, discusses ways to build intuition for your code, and teaches you some techniques to learn more efficiently and retrieve information more quickly. Read more.

Is security always a bolt-on in your software process? Is your secure development lifecycle "build, then duct-tape on some security"? Wendy Knox Everette explains why good design principles go hand in hand with a strong security stance and highlights the importance of designing in security from the very start of your development process. Read more.