The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There's no central thing telling a complex adaptive system how to organize itself. They just evolved over time, and that happens according to some weird magical biological process. And so that's why I talk about teams being complex adaptive systems. An example I use again, the spring thing. If one person is sick at a different time, you get a different outcome. It's almost like every single line of codes could be or not be written depending on factors. So many interesting stuffs that you brought up here, right?So things from the type of networks that you have in the organization, whether it's hierarchical social,. How much information trick
“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.
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