Nathaniel Schutta
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
8:30 AM MDT
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.
While your organization may or may not have an SRE team, you have someone playing that role and we can all benefit from looking at the principles and practices that we can bring to bear on our projects. In this talk, I will introduce the concepts of SRE and how you can adopt these ideas on your applications.
Sifting Technologies - Separating the Wheat From the Chaff
10:30 AM MDT
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.
In this talk, I will explore what criteria we should consider when comparing technologies, how we can avoid burning platforms as well as what to do when we’ve reached a dead end. We will also apply these techniques to a current technology or two.
Thinking Architecturally
8:30 PM MDT
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?
As architects it is our responsibility to effectively guide our teams on the technology journey. In this talk I will outline the importance of trade offs, how we can analyze new technologies and how we can effectively capture the inevitable architectural decisions we will make. I will also explore the value of fitness functions as a way of ensuring the decisions we make are actually reflected in the code base.
Functions and Platforms and Containers, Oh My!
9:00 AM MDT
Let me guess - your company is all in on “the Cloud” but no one can really agree what that means. You’ve got one group Dockering all the things while another group just rearchitected the Wombat system as a set of functions…as a service. It is enough to make a busy developer’s head spin - how do we make sense of all the options we have? I hate to burst your bubble, but there are no silver bullets, just a set of tools that we can leverage to solve problems. And just as a master carpenter knows when to use their favorite framing hammer and when they need to reach for the finish hammer, we need to use the right tool at the right time to solve our problems.
In this talk we will survey the various options today’s application teams have at their disposal looking at the consequences of various approaches. We will clear up the buzzword bingo to give you a solid foundation in various cloud computing approaches. Most importantly, we will discuss why the right answer will almost always be: and not or.
Building a Front end Pipeline
9:00 AM MDT
Back in the day, it used to be so simple. Our projects had a main.js file that contained a few hundred lines and every so often the corporate communication department would ship out some new CSS files. But now things are not quite so easy. With more and more single page apps containing thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of JavaScript, we're going to need a bigger boat.
In this talk I will explore various options you can deploy on your projects to tame the mass of code that lives on the front end of our applications. From NPM to Gulp to Webpack, this talk will help you establish a front end pipeline.
Production Hardened Services
10:45 AM MDT
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?
In this talk, I will go beyond the buzzwords into the nitty gritty of actually succeeding with a service based architecture. We will cover the principles and practices that will make sure your systems are stable and resilient while allowing you to get a decent night's sleep!
Communication for Architects
1:30 PM MDT
At the end of the day, an architect's primary job is to communicate. Not only do we need to make sure our teams understand the design of the system well enough to implement it, we must be able to explain our decisions to an audience that isn't impressed with how many TLAs you can rattle off in one sentence. Successful architects need to seamlessly transition from in depth technical conversations to budget meetings to discussions with end users adjusting the message to fit the audience.
While oral communication is key, good architects also spend a good deal of time putting pixel to screen via email, IM and various architectural documents we're expected to create. We need to write clearly and concisely while also knowing when the best course of action is to pick up the phone or walk to someone's desk.
In this talk, we'll explore the various methods that we as architects use to communicate with our stakeholders. We'll talk about knowing our audience, being able to present as well as how to run a good meeting. We'll discuss various patterns (and antipatterns) of presenting along with some concrete advice on how to do it better. At the end of the day, our job is to tell effectively tell a story - this talk will look at ways to do that.
Books
Presentation Patterns: Techniques for Crafting Better Presentations
by Neal Ford, Matthew McCullough, and Nathaniel Schutta
Presentation Patterns is the first book on presentations that categorizes and organizes the building blocks (or patterns) that you’ll need to communicate effectively using presentation tools like Keynote and PowerPoint.
Patterns are like the lower-level steps found inside recipes; they are the techniques you must master to be considered a master chef or master presenter. You can use the patterns in this book to construct your own recipes for different contexts, such as business meetings, technical demonstrations, scientific expositions, and keynotes, just to name a few.
Although there are no such things as antirecipes, this book shows you lots of antipatterns—things you should avoid doing in presentations. Modern presentation tools often encourage ineffective presentation techniques, but this book shows you how to avoid them.
Each pattern is introduced with a memorable name, a definition, and a brief explanation of motivation. Readers learn where the pattern applies, the consequences of applying it, and how to apply it. The authors also identify critical antipatterns: clichés, fallacies, and design mistakes that cause presentations to disappoint. These problems are easy to avoid—once you know how.
Presentation Patterns will help you
- Plan what you’ll say, who you’ll say it to, how long you’ll talk, and where you’ll present
- Perfectly calibrate your presentation to your audience
- Use the storyteller’s “narrative arc” to full advantage
- Strengthen your credibility—and avoid mistakes that hurt it
- Hone your message before you ever touch presentation software
- Incorporate visuals that support your message instead of hindering it
- Create highly effective “infodecks” that work when you’re not able to deliver a talk in person
- Construct slides that really communicate and avoid “Ant Fonts,” “Floodmarks,” “Alienating Artifacts,” and other errors
- Master 13 powerful techniques for delivering your presentation with power, authority, and clarity
Whether you use this book as a handy reference or read it from start to finish, it will be a revelation: an entirely new language for systematically planning, creating, and delivering more powerful presentations. You’ll quickly find it indispensable—no matter what you’re presenting, who your audiences are, or what message you’re driving home.
Pro Ajax and Java Frameworks
by Nathaniel Schutta and Ryan Asleson
Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is the ultimate web programming methodology for producing dynamic, rich web experiences. Java developers are crying out for guides showing how to add Ajax functionality to web applications, and this book meets their needs with Pro Ajax and Java. This is the book every Java developer needs to become expert in Ajax. The authors provide the reader with the perfect Java/Ajax toolkit to get started quickly, exploring Ajax development in detail using the 4 most popular Java web application frameworks: Struts, Spring, JSF, and Tapestry.
Foundations of Ajax
by Nathaniel Schutta and Ryan Asleson
* Ajax is one of the hottest topics in the developer community right now! and this will be the first Ajax book that offers detailed explanation of how Ajax works and how to use it to best effect. Theory and practice covered immediately in one volume.* Ajax works across many platforms and different groups of developers – this book is designed to be suitable for all those developers across all those platforms, who are interested in the hot new topic of Ajax.
* Demand for Ajax knowledge will be strong. Leading technology companies like Google, Yahoo, Adaptive Path, and Amazon are adopting Ajax techniques, and many other companies are doing the same in order to compete with Ajax. This book connect the developer community to the new Ajax functionality.
Extreme UI Design: The User is Always Right
by
You know about Extreme Programming, Agile cooperation, and continuous improvement, but did you know you can apply these to UI design? I'll show you how to make your end users happy all the time by applying what you already know about software development to the design and implementation of user interfaces. More and more, developers are being called upon to create user interfaces without designers. Extreme UI Design: The User is Always Right will show you how to use your well-honed programming skills to build measurably effective front ends.
It's all about usability, the software equivalent of flossing; you know you should do it, yet sometimes there just isn't time. For developers, there often isn't money to hire a designer. In tough times, developers who can design become essential, but most software engineers are schooled in algorithms and compilers and rarely in the intricacies of user interaction. This book is for all of you who find yourselves working on the front lines of software development and want to create an application that respects the maxim that all users are right.
- Discover best UI design practices for software engineers.
- Maximize usability right in your code with a few simple tools.
- Write software that works for the user!
What you'll learn
- Distinguish usability myth from reality
- Give users both what they want and what they need (these aren't the same)
- Use your application prototypes as test beds for usability
- Apply rigorous heuristics to measuring UI effectiveness
- See why CRAP is important to creating good interfaces
- Identify and avoid common UI anti-patterns
Who is this book for?
Looking to get an edge in today's workplace? Worried about being downsized? As companies look to cut expenses, the developer who can do more has a better chance of survival. If the UI team gets the axe, can you step in and help run a usability test or whack out a paper-based prototype? After reading this book, you'll be more valuable to your software development organization, you'll have a more complete toolbox, and you'll create applications that don't make your users yack .
This book is primarily aimed at software developers who are tasked with front-end development. Considering that almost all software has some kind of interface, it should appeal to a large audience. Depending on how the book is slanted, it should also interest the agile community.