Mentor, author, Transcendence Corporation

Dr. West has been involved in software development since the term ’software engineering’ was first coined. He is a noted expert in Object technology and Agile methodology. He an author of two books (Object Thinking and Design Thinking) and scores of papers on software development. He has spoken at numerous conferences and has extensive international experience as a mentor, coach, and change agent. He is currently completing two additional books: Living System Design and Micro-Service Architecture: The Essentials.

Design Thinking for Software Developers

The genius of Steve Jobs and the incredible success of Apple are attributed to «design.» Software developers talk about design all the time, seldom realizing that their understanding of design is quite different from that of Jobs and Apple.

This presentation will illustrate why a different kind of «design» and «design thinking» (ala Apple) is required if we are to meet contemporary challenges of software development.

We begin the presentation with an examination of systems — the familiar technical and deterministic artificial systems of computer and program — then the complex and ultra-large scale systems of the enterprise and global Web. We will look at how and why the latter generate «wicked problems» that are not amenable to «engineering» or «computational» thinking.

The majority of the presentation will focus on presenting 29 patterns of design thinking — exploring a small number of them in detail — derived from studying the work of traditional designers (architects, graphical designers, product designers, etc.) and companies like Apple where design thinking has proven to be of incalculable value.

Concrete application of the ideas being presented will be found throughout the presentation.

Master-class: Essential Micro-service Architecture

October 30, 2016

In English with translation to Russian
Requires separate registration

Exclusive invitation from David West

The excitement about the potential of micro-service architecture is growing with an increasing number of companies following the lead of Google, Spotify, and most notably Netflix if the effort to realize that potential.

The goal of this workshop is to provide attendees with and essential foundation knowledge of concepts and practices. Participants will have the opportunity to test their growing understanding via guided exercises. An optional fifth hour of the workshop will be dedicated to answering questions and exploring attendee supplied example problems / domains.

The workshop begins with a brief discussion of why MSA is of such potentially great value, an examination of benefits and challenges before presenting basic definitions and concepts.

The nature of a micro-service is examined and the first exercise focuses on identifying micro services and what they might look like implemented in code. We then turn to architecture I — aggregating micro-services into components that are loosely coupled and highly cohesive. The relationship between domain decomposition and modeling and micro-service components is addressed as is the structural nature of a component (services provided, knowledge required, and interface)

Components can be combined and inter-related only if they have additional capabilities such as being able to reflect on their nature, remain ‘run-time modifiable’, and handle event-driven interactions. This discussion will precede the second exercise.

Examination of applications and systems follows along with a discussion of how MSA enables radically different forms of architecture — great potential along with significant challenge.

The final section of the workshop will focus on process, teams, and developer skills along with supporting technologies.

The workshop is scheduled for four hours. Everyone is invited to stay an additional hour during which we will answer additional questions and work on attendee supplied examples or problems.