Nathaniel Schutta
Central Ohio Software Symposium
Columbus · May 1 - 3, 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.
Modeling for Architects
In some organizations, architects are dismissed as people that draw box and arrow diagrams - the dreaded whiteboard architect. While we don't want to foster that stereotype, 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.
Modeling for Architects
In some organizations, architects are dismissed as people that draw box and arrow diagrams - the dreaded whiteboard architect. While we don't want to foster that stereotype, 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.
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.
Reviewing Architectures
Good architects are, almost by definition, good story tellers. And while good communication skills are vital to success as an architect, so too is an ability to constructively critique an architecture. In this talk, we'll explore why reviews are important and what it takes to perform them well. Additionally, we'll talk about the importance of planning and preparation in conducting a successful review.