Software Crafts Podcast

Jeppe Cramon is the guest for this episode. He is challenged with the pattern “Make a Bridge to the New Town” from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns repository (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). Jeppe shares his experiences using this pattern, and we discuss the different technical implementations that can be used to migrate between systems. We dive into how we build systems and the different perspectives of people who create software and subject matter experts. Yes, we discussed eventual consistency and how we, people that make software, sometimes try to solve a problem that we don’t have.

Jeppe recommends the following resources:

• Event Modelling
• Greg Young DDD course, blogs and videos
• Udi Dahan Learn Advanced Distributed Systems Design, talks and videos
• Bill Poll blog

Jeppe Cramon (@jeppec) is a hands-on software architect and the founder of Cloud Create, where he helps customers build scalable and evolvable solutions. He has a passion for building loosely coupled event-driven systems.

Aviv Ben-Yosef is our guest for this episode. We will start with the heuristic “Dynamic Strategy”, from the Cloud Native Patterns (https://www.cnpatterns.org/strategy-risk-reduction/dynamic-strategy). Aviv explains different approaches from executives, namely CTO’s and VP of Engineering, linking to the impact they have on their organisations. From strategy to technology to people management, we discuss different patterns and how different organisations evolved.

Aviv recommends:

• The Tech Executive Operating System by Aviv Ben-Yosef
• Rands Leadership Slack
• Dev Interact Slack

Aviv Ben-Yosef (@avivby) is a tech executive consultant and author of the book “The Tech Executive Operating System”.

If you are curious about the guest, we are hosting Lea Kovac Beckman. She is challenged with the heuristic “Be curious” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/curiosity/). She describes how cycles of curiosity and boredom can foster innovation, what is the impact as persons, but also in this digital era, and how it impacts teams and organisations.

She shares how she uses innovation in her work and how curiosity and collaboration can be partners in finding a better solution rather than thinking in isolation.

Lea recommends the following resources:

Lea recommends the following resources:

• Curiosity: The Good, the Bad, and the Double-Edged Sword, by Christopher Bergland (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201608/curiosity-the-good-the-bad-and-the-double-edged-sword) 
• "Izzy, Did You Ask a Good Question Today?", from Isidor I. Rabi in New York Times" (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/19/opinion/l-izzy-did-you-ask-a-good-question-today-712388.html) 
• Why boredom is bad... and good for you, from David Robson, (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20141218-why-boredom-is-good-for-you) 
• The Importance of Being Bored in a Digital Age, by Alec Sears (https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-importance-of-being-bored-in-a-digital-age/) 
• Conscious competence learning model by psychologist Noel Burch
• The Flexibility of the Four Stages of Competence by Jared Spool (https://articles.uie.com/four_stages_competence/) 
• Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

Lea (@leakovac) is an independent UX Design consultant with a focus on user research and strategy. Together with product teams she has for many years developed digital services and tools for leading Swedish media companies like the Swedish Television and Bonnier News. She enjoys working closely with journalists, an environment where you are rewarded for asking questions.

Essential to her work is bringing different perspectives and skillsets together in all parts of the work process, in reaching a common set goal – both in discovery and delivery. She's experienced that the whole team approach mindset is more innovative, effective and exciting. It enables you to learn about, understand and affect areas that would otherwise be out of reach an

Einar Høst is the guest of this week. He is challenged with the heuristic “It’s easier to keep a system working than to fix it after you break it” from the Embedded Artistry repository (https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2018/04/26/embedded-rules-of-thumb/). Einar describes how feedback cycles are critical to keeping a system working and how complex systems evolve from simpler systems, connecting both, how our engineering practices can support a reliable software development process.

Einar shares the pivotal moment in his career with us where he realised that collaboration was vital for success in the software industry. 

Einar recommends:

• Data and Reality: A Timeless Perspective on Perceiving and Managing Information in Our Imprecise World by William Kent
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

Einar W. Høst (@einarwh) is a software developer at NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster. He enjoys domain modelling, API design and computer programming. He thinks that programs should be written for people to read and also for machines to laugh at.

In this episode, we host James Urquhart. James is challenged with the heuristic “Use of standard interfaces and protocols for event-driven integration”, based on his recent work. We discuss the changes in the behaviour of teams creating software when they embrace an event-driven integration, together with leveraging engineering practices like continuous delivery.

James also shares his experiences with value streams and the impacts on software architecture. By using event-driven integration and flow architectures to unlock the value within organisations and also between organisations. He predicts that the next decade will be very dynamic in this space, and technology and cost of ownership can be potential roadblocks.

James recommends:

• Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and  Companies from Geoffrey West
• Open resources as Kafka, Apache Flink and Swin.AI
• Flow Architectures from James Urquhart
• Wardley Maps
• Promise Theory

James Urquhart is a Strategic Executive Advisor for VMware Tanzu customers. James brings almost 30 years of experience in distributed applications development, deployment, and operations, focusing on software as a complex adaptive system, cloud-native applications and platforms, and automation. Prior to joining VMware, via Pivotal, James ran product and engineering teams for AWS, SOASTA, and Dell (via Enstratius). James has also written and spoken extensively about software agility and the business opportunities it affords.

James was named one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing by both the MIT Technology Review and the Huffington Post and is a former contributing author to GigaOm and CNET. He recently completed a book on event-driven integration for O'Reilly Publishing titled "Flow Architectures: The Future of Event-Driven Integration".

James graduated from Macalester College with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Physics.

This week, Peter Maddison is our guest, and he is challenged with the heuristic “Measure what matters” from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/strategy-risk-reduction/measure-what-matters). We discuss how to measure value and what techniques can be helpful to define metrics for teams creating and delivering software. We discuss how to expand towards measuring organisational performance and the impacts of different industry trends on our profession. He suggests starting measuring what matters: go and ask!

Peter recommends:

• How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/444653.How_to_Measure_Anything) 
• Escape Velocity by Doc Norton (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41046439-escape-velocity---better-metrics-for-agile-teams) 
• Measuring Outcomes... or how to get meaningful metrics with Gino Marckx (https://www.elevatechange.co/shareable/measuring-outcomes-or-how-to-get-meaningful-metrics-with-gino-marckx/) 
• Our Xodiac blog posts on metrics (https://xodiac.ca/blog/tags/metrics) 
• Focused Objectives GitHub repo - Lots of useful spreadsheets (https://github.com/FocusedObjective/FocusedObjective.Resources/tree/master/Spreadsheets) 

Peter Maddison (@pgmaddison), coach and consultant with over 20 years of experience n helping organisations improve and thrive.

Andrew Harmel-Law is our guest of this week, and he will share his experiences over the heuristic “Maximize cohesion, minimize coupling” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/maximize-cohesion-minimize-coupling/). We start discussing the original scope of the heuristic, the software code, but quickly expand to his experiences with cohesion and coupling at the organisation level.

We discuss how the communication pathways can enable and harm an organisation, and how the knowledge silos can be broken. Andrew shares his architecture practices, namely how to move between the Domain-Driven Design strategic patterns to the tactical patterns, crossing the different organisation layers effectively. 

Andrew recommends the following resources:

• Domain-Driven Design, Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans
• Happy Path Programming podcast by Bruce Eckel and James Ward
• Test-Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck

Andrew Harmel-Law (@al94781) is Tech Principal at ThoughtWorks and a Domain-Driven Design enthusiast. He is a public speaker and O’Reilly author.

This week on our show, we have Niranjani! She will share her opinion and experiences about the heuristic “Sleep easy on a green build” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/no-broken-builds/). We discuss her recent journey, where continuous improvement based on a green (or red) build drove the teams to find solutions to guarantee the quality of the product, and at the same time the speed of shipping features. From automated testing to observability and A/B testing test data challenges, she shares how the practices evolved over time.

Niranjani recommends the following resources:

• Leading Quality - How Great Leaders Deliver High Quality Software & Accelerate Growth from Ronald Cummings-John & Owais Peer
• Team Topologies - Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow from Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
• Liz Fong-Jones blog (https://www.lizthegrey.com/) 
• Andrew Bosworth blog (https://boz.com/) 

Niranjani (@RanjaniRambles) is an enthusiastic engineer passionate about writing code to break applications! She has worked at both startups and well-established companies like eBay, Twitter, Pinterest and now Lyft. She strives to strike a balance between being a workaholic and a wanna-be-traveller who is open-minded but still likes to believe unicorns are real!

Ken Power is challenged with the heuristic “Use a systematic mechanism of learning” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Use_a_systematic_mechanism_of_learning). He shares how he learns, with structure and unstructured approaches, and also how teams and organisations can learn. Our discussion goes into complex adaptive systems, different patterns, and how learning is one of the qualities present in resilient organisations. Last but not least how complexity and mapping can go hand-in-hand.

Ken recommends the following resources:

• Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime from Sean Carroll
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life from Mark Manson
• 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results from Esther Derby
• The Heat of the Moment: Life and Death Decision-Making From a Firefighter from Sabrina Cohen-Hatton
• Lex Fridman Podcast (https://lexfridman.com/podcast/)
• Rasa Chat‪s
  

Ken (@ken_power) is an engineering leader with more than 20 years’ experience in software engineering. His current focus is working with intelligent autonomous systems, including software for self-driving cars and edge devices.

His focus is the intersection of people, product development, strategy, architecture, leadership, agility, and engineering culture.

Ken is an independent consultant and product developer. In addition, he holds a research fellowship with Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre, where his current research focus is connected autonomous vehicles. He is also an associate lecturer with the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he teaches strategy & planning, systems analysis & design, and large-scale transformation.

Ken has held multiple technical and leadership positions in organizations, ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. He was with Cisco for 11 years, where he served as Principal Engineer and Engineering Director with multiple global business units.

Ken has authored more than 35 peer-reviewed publications on software engineering topics, including winning the IEEE Software best paper award.

He is a speaker at leading international conferences on architecture, software engineering, agile, and lean product development, and regularly serves as a conference organizer and program committee member. He was co-editor of the 2019 IEEE Software special issue on Large-Scale Agile Development.

Ken has a B.Eng. in Software Engineering, a MSc in Artificial Intelligence, and a PhD in comple

 A new episode is out, and today we feature Dawn Ahukanna (@dawnahukanna). She is challenged with the heuristic “Your solution should not be more complicated than the problem” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/kiss/). We discuss what solution vs problem space needs, and how different disciplines complement each other in order to deliver value. Dawn shares with us what are the heuristics that allow people with different perspectives to cross their paths to solve a complex problem.

Dawn recommends the following resources:

• As-is scenario mapping (https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/toolkit/activity/as-is-scenario-map)
• To-be scenario mapping (https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/toolkit/activity/to-be-scenario-map) 
• Service Blueprint (Sequence diagram for people and interactions) (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/service-blueprints-definition/)
• Cynefin framework (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework)
• Wardley maps (https://medium.com/wardleymaps)

Dawn Ahukanna (@dawnahukanna) is a Design Principal at IBM Design. She's always been curious about how "things" work, taking things apart and trying, failing, learning, trying again, failing, trying again and finally putting them back to together. Sometimes, making completely new things in the what should have been a re-assembly process.

She started her career as a Chemical Engineer, taking things apart at the atomic level and figuring out how they worked. Then simulating and emulating abstract models by developing and programming software. Finally progressing to figuring out how people work, without taking them apart or simulating, as a Design Principal and Front-End Architect.

Her mission: To design, develop and deliver digital user experiences that hopefully delight, definitely enables or at least don't frustrate, the clients and users.