Leadership skills sessions

Communication is not an optional soft skill for architects—it's essential to our success. We can have the most brilliant ideas, but if we're ineffective in communicating their value or if we can't obtain buy-in from our stakeholders, we won't be successful. Seth Dobbs shares a process for effectively shaping and communicating your solutions to different stakeholders. 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.

When developers start as tech leads or architects, they're often confused about how and where to start. Stefania Stefansdottir walks you through tasks and examples of how to get a team up and running with a new project in an existing ecosystem as well as pitfalls and gotchas to keep in mind. Read more.

Architects provide guiding principles as part of their architecture to enable decision making for unforeseen details but seldom develop guiding principles as leaders and for interacting with people. Seth Dobbs shares a core set of principles that enable effective interactions with your team and your stakeholders. 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.

Mandy Waite shares how she and her team at Google Cloud are working to make developers happier and more productive and details how her team uses their internal research and expands upon it to collaborate with Google Cloud partners and open source projects. Join in to get tips on how to cultivate a DevOps culture inside your company. Read more.

How can architects collect and make sense of stories from the tactical frontlines to inform long-term technology strategy and vision? Cat Swetel reviews published time span research and works through what the shorter time spans of Agile and CI/CD may mean for software architecture and sociotechnical systems overall. 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.

After an expensive failed attempt at a complete rewrite, Ticketmaster is attempting to evolve the monolith that is its core ticketing platform. Cat Swetel isn't talking about best practices for DevOpsing your monolith; she tells the true story of one company’s journey toward a more flexible, adaptable, and easily maintainable architecture using tools like Wardley Maps and real options theory. Read more.