Nathaniel Schutta
ÜberConf
Denver · July 19 - 22, 2016
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
Leading Technical Change
Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are “working” today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?
Agile in the Large
Almost every example of an agile project involves a single team and while many successful projects are delivered that way, most enterprise software requires the interaction of several teams. But how do we scale agile beyond a single team? What practices translate and which ones don't? In this talk we'll discuss some of the issues you'll encounter as you move agile beyond a single group and how you can keep multiple stakeholders happy. While it isn't as simple as having a “scrum of scrums” it isn't as hard as replacing every line of COBOL.
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.
Modeling for Web 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 Web 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.
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.
JavaScript Katas
If you have ever studied a martial art, chances are you are familiar with katas: the practice of individual training exercises. Repeatedly. It may seem pointless to practice the same move again and again, the only way to improve is repetition. We can apply the same concept to learning programming languages.
HTML5 Revisited
The technology space is a lot like the ocean - miss one wave and another will come along shortly; most shiny new things begin with a sizable amount of hype as everyone rushes to play with the new toy. This cycle is often met with a level of disappointment as we quickly discover our new bauble isn't all that and a bag of chips so we rush off to the next best thing ever.