I think the technical side of things is accelerated off in all sorts of directions. It's much harder to change your development organization and organizational structure frequently, like we can do when we refact at code bases. The time scales to change and for experimentation are much longer. I would have put more assets into describing if these optimize your ability to get things done and to scale teams around these things. Because that fundamentally is such a huge issue in our industry.
“Spend some time looking at the system in which you work. Understand how the work is working. Understand how flow is for your organization. And then you can work to optimize that."
James Lewis is a Director at ThoughtWorks and a pioneer of microservice architecture. In this episode, we went back memory lane to the time when James first coined and popularized the microservice architecture. James described his definition of a microservice and its important characteristics. He also shared the recent microservice evolution, including the swing between microservice and monolith. In the second half, James shared his insights from complexity science related to different scaling patterns. Particularly, he explained how different hierarchy types can affect an organization’s growth rate. Towards the end, James gave some tips on how organization can detect signs of suboptimal growth and what we can do to maintain organizational agility.
Listen out for:
- Career Journey - [00:03:48]
- Coining Microservices - [00:07:25]
- Definition of Microservices - [00:14:13]
- Microservices Swing - [00:18:42]
- Scaling Law and Complexity Science - [00:24:05]
- Complex and Adaptive System - [00:40:01]
- Examining Sublinear Growth - [00:43:47]
- 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:51:19]
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James Lewis’s Bio
James is a Software Architect and Director at Thoughtworks based in the UK. He’s proud to have been a part of Thoughtworks’ journey for fourteen years and it’s ongoing mission of delivering technical excellence for its clients and in amplifying positive social change for an equitable future. As a member of the Thoughtworks Technical Advisory Board, the group that creates the Technology Radar, he contributes to industry adoption of open source and other tools, techniques, platforms and languages.
He is an internationally recognised expert on software architecture and design and on its intersection with organisational design and lean product development. After defining what was the newly emerging Microservices architectural style back in 2014, James’ primary consulting focus these days is helping organisations with technology strategy, distributed systems design and adoption of SOA.
Follow James Lewis:
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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/135
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