Tech Lead Journal

“It is important to eliminate toil. If you don’t eliminate toil, you won’t have time to fix problems strategically, because strategic initiatives take precedence."

Amrith Raj is a Senior Solutions Architect at Dynatrace. In this episode, Amrith walked us through the evolution and current state of IT Operations (ITOps). He described how the ITOps role has developed over time and becoming increasingly more challenging with the increased level of infrastructure abstraction and complexity, especially in the current era of cloud and Platform-as-a-Service. In order to manage such high amount of complexity, Amrith shared the importance of having good culture and practices and touched on some important Google SRE concepts, such as toil and automation. Amrith then shared some recent ITOps advancement, i.e. NoOps and AIOps, and how we can leverage on them to improve the way we solve problems. Also, make sure you do not miss Amrith’s pro tips on how we can become a better SRE and how to use Function-as-a-Service effectively.

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Amrith Raj’s Bio

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“Strategy is what earns. Use the strategic and innovative drivers to help us determine what our architecture needs to be. Architecture has to have a purpose."

Vaughn Vernon is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and he recently co-authored his new book “Strategic Monoliths and Microservices”. In this episode, Vaughn shared his story and rationale for writing his new book and why he thinks it is important to include the executives as the readers of the book. He emphasized the importance of focusing on strategic innovative aspects of software development and for driving those innovations using purposeful architectures. Vaughn then shared his insightful perspective on Conway’s Law and why he compares it with the law of gravity. We then discussed two important architectural aspects covered in the book, which are events first architecture and embracing latency, and why they are actually natural to how people communicate and get things done in real life. Towards the end, Vaughn summed up his book and left an important piece of advice that he wanted to convey regarding monoliths vs microservices and why software should require more balance and demand a better strategy.

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Vaughn Vernon’s Bio

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“Delay design decisions until it’s necessary. Architecture is an art, not a science. Don’t architect for things you don’t know. Your design decisions should always be built on facts, not guesses."

Pierre Pureur is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and an acclaimed software architect. In this second of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Pierre shared his own perspectives on the 6 key principles of continuous architecture. We then discussed in-depth the two important quality attributes, which are the scalability and performance. For each quality attribute, Pierre described the attribute definition, why it is an important architectural concern, and some of the common tactics used to improve the attribute in the modern system architecture.

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Pierre Pureur’s Bio

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“Successful project managers have a bias for action. They’re out there pushing the project forward all the time and doing all the things that need to be done to make the project successful."

Jana Axline is the founder and Managing Director of Project Genetics, with over 20 years of experience in leadership, project, and portfolio management. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about the important role of project management. Jana explained how project management is still much relevant in the current era of agile and “project to product” movement within the tech industry. She outlined the important skill set required to become an effective project manager, how a project manager can earn much respect from the team, and pointed out some of the common project management anti-patterns we should avoid. She also gave her practical advice on how to do effective status report and project escalation. Towards the end, Jana gave her insightful perspectives based on her vast experience of why IT projects tend to have a high failure rate.

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Jana Axline’s Bio

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“Many organizations think in order to be safe, they have to be slow. But the data shows us that the best performers are getting both. And in fact, as speed increases, so too does stability."

Nathen Harvey is the co-author of 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report and a Developer Advocate at Google. In this episode, we discussed in-depth the latest release of the State of DevOps Report. Nathen started by describing what the report is all about, how it got started, and explained the five key metrics suggested by the report to measure the software delivery and operational performance. Nathen then explained how the report categorizes different performers based on their performance against the key metrics and how the elite performers outperform the others in terms of speed, stability, and reliability. Next, we dived into several new key findings that came out of the 2021 report that relate to documentation, secure software supply chain, and burnout. Towards the end, Nathen gave great tips on how we can use the findings from the reports to get started and improve our software delivery and operational performance, that ultimately will improve our organizational performance.

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Nathen Harvey’s Bio

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“As an architect, your main focus is to influence what’s running in production and to make sure you make the right decisions, so that you have a sustainable product."

Murat Erder is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and the CTO of People and Procurement at Deutsche Bank. In this first of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Murat started by explaining what software architecture is and then explained in-depth the six principles of continuous architecture mindset. Murat continued by outlining the four essential activities of architecture that involve architectural decisions, technical debt, quality attributes, and feedback loops. Towards the end, we discussed the importance of data as an architectural concern. We touched on a few recent key data technology trends that impact and drive software architecture, including the importance of the data model as a prerequisite for successful software architecture.

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Murat Erder’s Bio

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“Time is important for business. We have to model it explicitly. Temporal modeling means that we use time-based artifacts as first modeling citizens."

Tomasz Jaskula is the CTO and co-founder of Luteceo and an experienced software developer and architect. In this episode, we started off discussing how Domain-Driven Design (DDD) influenced Tomasz’s view on software development approach and its relation with functional programming. Tomasz then explained in depth about the time concept in business applications and temporal modeling, in particular, bi-temporal modeling. He mentioned the different concepts of time in temporal modeling, explaining them using an example for easier illustration. We then extended our discussion further to Event Sourcing, understanding the key concept, its relation to temporal modeling, when we should decide to use Event Sourcing in our application, and some available tools that can help us implement Event Sourcing.

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Tomasz’s Bio

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“The best leaders are those that get things done through other people."

Nick Horney is the author of “VUCA Masters” and founder of Agility Consulting. In this episode, Nick shared his innovations in leadership agility that include AGILE Model® and Leadership Agility Fitness, which are the cornerstones for becoming inspiring leaders in the current VUCA world, i.e. the VUCA Masters. Nick also shared how we can extend his leadership agility concepts to improve organizational behavior, culture, and mindset in order to reach organizational agility. Towards the end, Nick shared some inspiring leadership lessons from his 23 years of experience serving the US Navy Special Operations, describing the true characteristic and hallmark of the best leaders.

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Nick Horney’s Bio

Dr. Horney has written four books. The most recent is VUCA Masters: Developing Leadership Agility Fitness for the New World of Work (2021).

Nick retired from the U.S. Navy (Special Operations) at the rank of Captain and has applied that experience to his work with high performance team agility. He serves as a coach for The Honor Foundation focusing on the successful transition of Navy SEALs to the business world.

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“API design centers on effective communication, not just between developers, but also communication that combines product thinking, business, and technology all in one."

James Higginbotham is the author of “Principles of Web API Design” and an executive API consultant. In this episode, James explained why it is extremely important to design APIs properly and shared the five key important principles of API design taken from his book. James also recommended the API Design-First approach–a rapid & lightweight outcome-based API design process–to design and deliver APIs successfully, including the ADDR process and establishing API boundaries (in relation to DDD). Towards the end, James shared some recommendation for API testing strategies and also some anti-patterns that we should avoid.

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James Higginbotham’s Bio

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“If you’re a generalist, and if you’re good at multiple things, then you have a lot of options. You have a lot of career paths to choose from."

Deepu K Sasidharan is a polyglot developer and a Senior Developer Advocate for DevOps at Okta. In this episode, Deepu shared why he consciously becomes a polyglot and generalist developer. He emphasized the importance of knowing more than one thing in the current rapidly changing tech industry. He gave practical tips for new engineers to start out and shared his technique to learn new stuffs, including languages, by building personal indexes. We then discussed the current interview practices trend and why he thinks it needs to change, especially to make it more inclusive and less biased. Towards the end, Deepu shared about developer experience, a topic that he is highly passionate about, on why it is becoming more important and some tips for building a good developer experience.

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Deepu K Sasidharan’s Bio

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