Nathaniel Schutta
Salt Lake Software Symposium
Salt Lake City · June 8 - 9, 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
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.
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?
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?
Spring, Functions, Serverless and You
Today our world is full of things that are “as a service” - infrastructure, containers, platforms, software…and of course functions. With developers just now wrapping their heads around application platforms and containers, what are they to make of functions as a service? How does a busy developer cut through the hype and make sense of the world of serverless, Kubernetes, Spring Cloud Function and all the rest? This talk will clear up the confusion! We examine Riff, a FaaS built atop Kubernetes. We will discuss where functions and serverless fits in your world, and how you can get started with some simple demos. Though functions aren’t a silver bullet, they are an important part of the development toolbox; this talk saves you from the buzzword bingo to give you a solid foundation of the FaaS landscape.
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.