Software Architecture Superstream: Architecture Meets Data

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Neal Ford: Introduction (5 minutes) - 8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 4:00pm UTC/GMT

• Neal Ford welcomes you to the Software Architecture Superstream.

Pramod Sadalage: Evolutionary Database Design and Architecture (40 minutes) - 8:05am PT | 11:05am ET | 4:05pm UTC/GMT

• Many think the database impedes evolutionary development—but it doesn’t have to. Pramod Sadalage shows you how to apply evolutionary practices and database refactoring patterns to evolve your database design and architecture while delivering working software and business value.
• Pramod Sadalage is a director at Thoughtworks, bridging the divide between database professionals and application developers. He’s usually sent in to clients with particularly challenging data needs, which require new technologies and techniques. In the early 2000s, he developed techniques to allow relational databases to be designed in an evolutionary manner based on version-controlled schema migrations. He’s the author of Recipes for Continuous Database Integration, coauthor of Software Architecture: The Hard Parts, Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, and NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence, and contributing author of Building Evolutionary Architectures. He continues to speak and write about the insights he and his clients learn.

Tanmai Gopal: The GraphQL Data API Is the Key to Modern Product Development (Sponsored by Hasura) (30 minutes) - 8:45am PT | 11:45am ET | 4:45pm UTC/GMT

• APIs have become crucial to scaling a business successfully and serve as an essential source of growth in the digital era, unlocking information from previously closed systems. And with data continuing to explode in volume, types, and use cases (especially for ML/AI and data-driven applications), the data API is emerging as the most powerful point of leverage to unlock data and modern product development. Join Tanmai Gopal to learn about secular trends in data and product development that necessitate a data API, why GraphQL is the best choice for a data API, and what’s next.
• Tanmai Gopal is a cofounder at Hasura, an open source infrastructure startup that makes data access easy for developers building modern applications. Hasura ensures that real-time data access is scalable, secure, and easy by using a GraphQL API. Tanmai is a full stack engineer who’s passionate about making it easy to build things. Previously, he ran a consulting firm helping enterprises move from monolithic to cloud native environments.
• This session will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A in a breakout room. Stop by if you have more questions for Tanmai.
• Break (10 minutes)

Ian Gorton: Software Architecture for Big Data Systems (40 minutes) - 9:25am PT | 12:25pm ET | 5:25pm UTC/GMT

• The wide variety and different characteristics of contemporary distributed databases creates a complex technology acquisition and design landscape for organizations looking to build scalable, high-performance data management systems. In addition, big data systems are significant long-term investments that must scale to handle ever-increasing data volumes. These represent high-risk applications in which the software and data architectures are fundamental components of ensuring success. Ian Gorton takes you through some of the fundamental software architecture issues that you need to consider when adopting and designing systems based on the NoSQL and distributed SQL databases that are increasingly prominent in today’s IT systems.
• Ian Gorton is a professor of the practice at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University’s Seattle campus and the author of the recently published Foundation of Scalable Systems. Ian’s passionate about analyzing and designing complex, high-performance distributed systems and embodying design and architecture principles in methods and tools that can be exploited by architects in other projects. Previously, he was a senior member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute and a laboratory fellow in computational sciences and math at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he managed the Data Intensive Scientific Computing research group and was the chief architect for PNNL’s Data Intensive Computing Initiative.
• Break (5 minutes)

Natallia Dzenisenka: Happy Little Accidents—Caveats in Solution Architecture (40 minutes) - 10:10am PT | 1:10pm ET | 6:10pm UTC/GMT

• Is solution architecture or system design part of your job? This talk is for you! Natallia Dzenisenka shares some of the common caveats to consider during and after the process of designing a system, in requirements gathering, feature planning, database design backward compatibility, and more. Join in to learn how to identify and deal with common pitfalls at various stages of design and support (with real-world examples).
• Natallia Dzenisenka is a senior software engineer at Netflix, where she's working on building and improving the company’s ML and data systems at global scale. Natallia’s an expert on distributed systems, architecture, and data, and she has more than eight years of experience in those areas, with particular focus on scalable design, big data analysis and processing, distributed cloud programming, and more. Previously, Natallia worked on AWS Aurora distributed storage systems, developing a high-throughput cloud native relational database for giant data and scale.

Laine Minor and Josh Smith: Pivoting in the Noise—Event-Driven Architecture for Customer-Responsive Systems (40 minutes) - 10:50am PT | 1:50pm ET | 6:50pm UTC/GMT

• Hey! Hey! Hey! The world around us exists as a collection of events: things that happen and data points that we take in and process and decide what to do about (or not do about), all the time, every day. So why shouldn't the systems we interact with be structured in the same way? Laine Minor and Josh Smith explain event-driven architecture and why it's different from traditional monolith and also microservice architecture. They'll cover the pros and cons and discuss some of the technology that's currently out there to implement systems in this more customer-centric way.
• Laine Minor has been a developer, a technical lead, a stay-at-home mom, and an IT architect—and that last was a broad enough title that it let her do both technical things AND cultural things. She realized then that that was her most favorite place to be, in that in-between place of technology and culture. She also learned that enabling people and organizations is hard work, and that explaining that in-between place can help.
• Josh Smith has been in IT for 15 years, as a developer, lead dev, tech lead, architect, and enterprise architect. He's worked on big teams and small teams and even on a team of one. In the process, he's learned a ton, and he loves to share that information and mentor others. He also loves strategy—laying out plans and figuring out dependencies and which order to do things in. Included in this is a deep love of the complicated business + people + culture + tech (especially tech that makes people's lives easier) of IT strategy.

Neal Ford: Closing Remarks (5 minutes) - 11:30am PT | 2:30pm ET | 7:30pm UTC/GMT

• Neal Ford closes out today’s event.

Upcoming Software Architecture Superstream events:

• Software Architecture Trade-Offs - January 18, 2023