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The Practical Architect with Nate Schutta

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1:00 PM PDT on Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The Practical Architect with Nate Schutta

The Practical Architect with Nate Schutta

May 20 2020

In this episode

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?

As architects it is our responsibility to effectively guide our teams on the technology journey. In this talk I will outline the importance of trade offs, how we can analyze new technologies and how we can effectively capture the inevitable architectural decisions we will make. I will also explore the value of fitness functions as a way of ensuring the decisions we make are actually reflected in the code base.

Guests

Nate Schutta

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect focused on cloud computing and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books and appeared in various videos. He is a seasoned speaker, regularly presenting at conferences worldwide, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, Nate co-authored the book Presentation Patterns (O’Reilly Media, 2016) with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough. He also recently published Thinking Architecturally (O’Reilly Media, 2018), available as a free download from VMware.

Nate’s presentations cover a variety of topics, ranging from architecture fundamentals to mobile design, usability, cloud computing, JavaScript, and everything in between. His current slate of talks can be found in Talk Abstracts, however additional presentations can also be found at his NFJS Speaker Page. If you are interested in having Nate speak at your event, please reach out.

Hosts

Tiffany Jernigan

Tiffany is a senior developer advocate at VMware and is focused on Kubernetes. She previously worked as a software developer and developer advocate (nerd whisperer) for containers at Amazon. She also formerly worked at Docker and Intel. Prior to that, she graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in electrical engineering. In her free time she likes to spend time with her fiancé, family, and friends, as well as dabble in photography. You can find her on Twitter @tiffanyfayj.

Paul Czarkowski