Nathaniel Schutta
Lone Star Software Symposium: Dallas
Dallas · May 29 - 31, 2015
Architect as a Service
Nathaniel T. Schutta is a software architect and Java Champion focused on cloud computing, developer happiness and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books, appeared in countless videos and many podcasts. He’s also a seasoned speaker who regularly presents at worldwide conferences, 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, he coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough, and he also published Thinking Architecturally and Responsible Microservices available from O’Reilly. His latest book, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, is currently available in early release.
Presentations
The JavaScript Developer's Toolchain
Back in the day, web developers had to rely on their wits and a plethora of alert statements - to say our toolkit was spartan would be an understatement. But with the increased importance of web front ends and the rise of JavaScript MVC frameworks, a modern web developer toolkit is finally emerging.
Bulletproof JavaScript
Take a look at your codebase. Go ahead, this abstract will wait. Notice anything? Perhaps a few more lines of JavaScript than years past? JavaScript is no longer an outlier, a language for the interns, something we can just mash together. Today, JavaScript is a first class citizen. As such, we need to treat it will all the care and feeding we extend our server side languages. This talk will introduce you to a set of tools that will help you write bulletproof JavaScript.
Communication for Architects
At the end of the day, an architect's primary job is to communicate. Not only do we need to make sure our teams understand the design of the system well enough to implement it, we must be able to explain our decisions to an audience that isn't impressed with how many TLAs you can rattle off in one sentence. Successful architects need to seamlessly transition from in depth technical conversations to budget meetings to discussions with end users adjusting the message to fit the audience.
You're an Architect...Now What?
Many software developers point their career towards ascending to the gilded rank of Architect…but what does it mean to actually be one? While many of us labor under false pretense of abject technical decision making, the reality is often very different. You'll code less, spending more time on activities that lack an objective green/red bar. But you'll also an opportunity to impact far more than one project.
In this talk, I'll speak to my own journey. We'll touch on influencing coworkers, the importance of communication and the importance of cup of coffee.