Nathaniel Schutta
ÜberConf
Denver · July 17 - 20, 2018
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
Production Hardened Services
By now I bet your company has hundreds, maybe thousands of services, heck you might even consider some of them micro is stature! And while many organizations have plowed headlong down this particular architectural path, your spidey sense might be tingling…how do we keep this ecosystem healthy?
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.
Sifting Technologies - Separating the Wheat From the Chaff
If you’ve spent any amount of time in the software field, you’ve undoubtably found yourself in a (potentially heated) discussion about the merits of one technology, language or framework versus another. And while you may have enjoyed the technical debate, as software professionals, we owe it to our customers (as well as our future selves) to make good decisions when it comes to picking one technology over another.
Building a Front end Pipeline
Back in the day, it used to be so simple. Our projects had a main.js file that contained a few hundred lines and every so often the corporate communication department would ship out some new CSS files. But now things are not quite so easy. With more and more single page apps containing thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of JavaScript, we're going to need a bigger boat.
Functions and Platforms and Containers, Oh My!
Let me guess - your company is all in on “the Cloud” but no one can really agree what that means. You’ve got one group Dockering all the things while another group just rearchitected the Wombat system as a set of functions…as a service. It is enough to make a busy developer’s head spin - how do we make sense of all the options we have? I hate to burst your bubble, but there are no silver bullets, just a set of tools that we can leverage to solve problems. And just as a master carpenter knows when to use their favorite framing hammer and when they need to reach for the finish hammer, we need to use the right tool at the right time to solve our problems.
An Architect's Guide to Site Reliability Engineering
Development teams often focus on getting code to production losing site of what comes after the design and build phase. But we must consider the full life cycle of our systems from inception to deployment through to sunset, a discipline many companies refer to as site reliability engineering.
Thinking Architecturally
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?