Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

In this episode, we speak with Erik Dörnenburg, Head of Technology for Europe, and Folker Bernitt, a lead developer for Pixelated and a security specialist, about Pixelated, an open source encrypted webmail platform currently in development at ThoughtWorks. We talk about why secure communication is important to a free society and take a dive into Pixelated’s architecture, cryptography, and future development path. After taking a dive into Pixelated’s architecture and cryptography, we finish by looking at the future of Pixelated and a call to the open­source community for contributions.

[Recorded at the May 12, 2015 Microservices Meetup in NY.] Dealing with a traffic spike amounting to half of Amazon’s traffic each day when new sales are announced is no easy matter. Michael Bryzek, co-founder of retailer Gilt Groupe, talks about the architectural and cultural evolution that took place as Gilt introduced microservices during its growth over the course of the past seven years. Transitioning from a few monolithic systems to somewhere in the range of 300 to 400 microservices today presented a lot of challenges along the way. First describing how they decided to prioritize which parts of their system to optimize by breaking it into smaller, more optimized services, Bryzek covers some of the challenges that were encountered and how they went about solving them. He also describes some of the steps they took right up until today, when they have begun transitioning to Amazon’s AWS. Successfully building a microservices architecture typically takes a strong culture of trust with teams that are empowered to do the right thing. Bryzek discusses some of the sources of inspiration they had when faced with the problem of developing trust while growing their engineering capability, and some of the other organizations whose lessons they looked to for ideas.

In the most recent Technology Radar, Scott Shaw and his colleagues from the ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board have added Microservice Envy to the Hold Ring, because they are concerned people are overdoing it. Start small, start with one Microservice,” is Scott's advice. In this interview, Johannes Thönes talks to Scott about the prerequisites of being successful with a Microservice style architecture. First, you need to have an automatic deployment pipeline in place so you can deploy effectively and frequently to the cloud. You also need to have good DevOps practices and infrastructure automation around, so spinning up a dedicated server is not something that takes month. Scott explains, that for being able to do Microservices, you need to have a clear understanding of the domain, which will give your Microservices their bounded context rooted in your domain. His advice for green field application, especially when you don’t have the practices in place, is to start with a monolith (or one lonely Microservices) and then split it up, when it makes sense. “Services need to evolve," he says.

In this episode, Claudia Melo, head of technology for ThoughtWorks Latin America, talks to Johannes Thönes about Brazil about Open Source Software and the startup scene in Brazil. As an associate researcher for the University of São Paulo, Claudia has started a research project to compare the startup scenes in the United States, in Israel and in Brazil.

In this episode, we speak with Hao Xu, Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks China, about how to break down role divisions within a team and create collaborative environments. We touch on how economic theory and management theory created the divided, hierarchical workplace, and why today’s knowledge work is poorly suited to these structures. We close by discussing various techniques, such as capability radars and onboarding practices, that help to break down role divisions in product teams.

In this episode, we speak with Rachel Laycock, market technology principal for New York, and Jeff Norris, technology principal in San Francisco, about growing the next generation of technologists within your organization. We talk about practices and strategies that technical leaders can use to help their colleagues grow, as well as how to structure a team such that all members can simultaneously teach and learn from others.

This episode of the ThoughtWorks podcast focuses on the advancement of technology across the African continent. The guest in this episode, Brain Leke, head of technology for ThoughtWorks in Pan Africa, shares his thoughts with Johannes Thönes. They discuss the particular challenges Africa has as a technology location, but also how the limits actually encourage innovations. Leke also talk about the efforts ThoughtWorks is making to grow African technologists and the influence of Open Source in the continent. Because we talked about it in this episode. Africa had 1.1 billion people in 2013.

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Podcast, Neal Ford explains to Johannes Thönes what architectural considerations can be derived from the DevOps movement. This episode is a quick introduction to what Microservices are, what kind of architectural principles can be used to implement them, what a good test strategy for microservices can can look like. We also explain why you should have a continuous delivery practice running before starting to develop Microservices.

Dan McClure is the Innovation Design Practice Lead at ThoughtWorks. In this interview, by Johannes Thöenes, Dan discusses definitions of and misconceptions about innovation.

Johannes Thönes talks to James Lewis, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, about microservices. They discuss microservices’ recent popularity, architectural styles, deployment, size, technical decisions, and consumer-driven contracts. They also compare microservices to service-oriented architecture and wrap up the episode by talking about key figures in the microservice community and standing on the shoulders of giants. Recording venue: ThoughtWorks North Europe Away Day, Sherwood Forest, Newark, Nottinghamshire, UK This track also appeared on se-radio.net.