Tech Lead Journal

“Interactions with domain experts play a key role in implementing software. You have to make sure that you understand the problem you’re solving. You cannot provide a software solution without understanding the problem first." Vladik Khononov is the author of “Learning Domain-Driven Design”. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Vlad started by sharing why understanding business domain is crucial in software engineering and how DDD can help build the shared understanding between domain experts and software engineers. Vlad then explained the two important designs in DDD, i.e. the strategic and tactical designs, and how they relate to each other. For each design, Vlad touched on some important patterns, such as bounded context, context map, subdomain, aggregate, entity, and value object. Towards the end, Vlad gave great tips on applying DDD to brownfield projects and how those projects can benefit the most from some of the DDD practices. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:06:05] Importance of Understanding Business Domain - [00:10:42] How Domain-Driven Design Helps - [00:16:12] DDD Strategic Design - [00:20:21] Subdomain - [00:26:51] DDD Tactical Design - [00:32:44] Aggregate Pattern - [00:34:36] Entity Pattern - [00:40:43] Implementing DDD for Legacy System - [00:43:24] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:46:52] _____ Vladik Khononov’s Bio Vlad (Vladik) Khononov is a software engineer with over 20 years of industry experience, during which he has worked for companies large and small in roles ranging from webmaster to chief architect. Vlad maintains an active media career as an author, public speaker, and blogger. He travels the world consulting and talking about domain-driven design, microservices, and software architecture in general. Vladik lives in Northern Israel with his wife and an almost-reasonable number of cats. Follow Vladik: Twitter – @vladikk LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladikkhononov/ Website – https://vladikk.com/ Our Sponsor Today’s episode is proudly sponsored by Skills Matter, the global community and events platform for software professionals. Skills Matter is an easier way for technologists to grow their careers by connecting you and your peers with the best-in-class tech industry experts and communities. You get on-demand access to their latest content, thought leadership insights as well as the exciting schedule of tech events running across all time zones. Head on over to skillsmatter.com to become part of the tech community that matters most to you - it’s free to join and easy to keep up with the latest tech trends. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/76.

“It’s great if developers have understanding about the domain, because then they can propose better solutions, that’s not necessarily the same solution that the users have in mind, which are often limited by what they know." Stefan Hofer is the co-author of Domain Storytelling–a collaborative, visual and agile way to build domain-driven software. In this episode, Stefan shared the story of how he came up with Domain Storytelling and explained how this technique can help us understand business domain better and bridge the misunderstandings between software developers and domain experts. Stefan walked us through how the modeling works, including the notations and other pictorial aspects of it, and emphasized the importance of the collaborative aspect of Domain Storytelling. Stefan then explained how Domain Storytelling differs from other similar modeling techniques, such as Event Storming, and gave practical tips on how to run a successful online collaborative workshop. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:51] How Domain Storytelling Started - [00:07:01] Misunderstandings are Common Problems - [00:09:52] Importance of Understanding Domain - [00:12:08] Domain Storytelling - [00:13:46] The DDD Angle- [00:19:01] When Domain Expert is Unavailable - [00:20:34] Domain Storytelling Tools - [00:22:59] Pictographic Language - [00:25:51] Translating into Software - [00:30:23] Difference with Event Storming - [00:33:24] Online Collaborative Workshop - [00:38:00] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:43:13] _____ Stefan Hofer’s Bio Stefan Hofer is bad at drawing. However, he thinks he can build up domain knowledge by drawing domain stories. Stefan studied software engineering in Austria and earned a PhD in computer science. Since 2005, he has been working for WPS – Workplace Solutions in Hamburg, Germany. His job there is to help teams develop software that does the right job the right way. He maintains domainstorytelling.org. Follow Stefan: Twitter – @hofstef LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/hofstef/ Website – https://domainstorytelling.org/ Egon.io – http://egon.io/ Our Sponsor Today’s episode is proudly sponsored by Skills Matter, the global community and events platform for software professionals. Skills Matter is an easier way for technologists to grow their careers by connecting you and your peers with the best-in-class tech industry experts and communities. You get on-demand access to their latest content, thought leadership insights as well as the exciting schedule of tech events running across all time zones. Head on over to skillsmatter.com to become part of the tech community that matters most to you - it’s free to join and easy to keep up with the latest tech trends. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/75.

“Documentation is content marketing. If your docs don’t summarize what your product is actually about, you’re going to have a rough time getting anybody interested." Meredydd Luff is the founder of Anvil, the platform for building web apps with nothing but Python. In this episode, Meredydd shared his story starting Anvil and his point of view on the latest Low-Code & No-Code movement and whether it would affect the demand for developers. He touched on the importance of domain experts having the ability to develop software and how tools like Anvil could play a part in supporting them to translate their ideas better. In the second half of the episode, we discussed the importance of product documentation and how it also plays a major part in content marketing. Meredydd shared his tips and best practices for documentation, including how to create thriving online Q&A product forums. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:17] Anvil Story - [00:09:16] Low Code / No Code - [00:12:26] Domain Knowledge Coder - [00:18:08] Demand for Developers - [00:22:37] Importance of Product Documentation - [00:25:42] Documentation is Content Marketing - [00:29:16] Online Q&A Forums - [00:33:18] Developer Advocates - [00:36:55] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:39:43] _____ Meredydd Luff’s Bio Meredydd Luff is the founder of Anvil (https://anvil.works), the platform for building and deploying apps on the web with nothing but Python. He’s particularly interested in expanding access to code, and has a PhD in building usable programming systems. Follow Meredydd: Anvil – https://anvil.works/ Twitter – @meredydd LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredydd Our Sponsor Today’s episode is proudly sponsored by Skills Matter, the global community and events platform for software professionals. Skills Matter is an easier way for technologists to grow their careers by connecting you and your peers with the best-in-class tech industry experts and communities. You get on-demand access to their latest content, thought leadership insights as well as the exciting schedule of tech events running across all time zones. Head on over to skillsmatter.com to become part of the tech community that matters most to you - it’s free to join and easy to keep up with the latest tech trends. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/74.

“Because we ship stuff now almost immediately into public facing clients, almost as soon as we’re writing a line of code, we need to be thinking about how we make sure that it’s a secure line of code and it will be deployed and operated securely as well." Eoin Woods is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and the CTO at Endava. In this last of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Eoin shared the remaining two important quality attributes covered in the book, i.e. security and resilience. Eoin explained why we should treat security as a critical quality attribute, the changes in the security landscape that make security becomes more challenging, the threat modeling concept, how to do continuous threat modeling, and his 10 secure by design principles. Eoin then shared about resilience as a quality attribute, how we should differentiate resilience from high availability, some common resilience techniques that we can implement in our system, and the importance of embracing failure mindset. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:42] Software Architecture - [00:09:43] Quality Attributes: Security - [00:12:19] Security Landscape Changes - [00:14:08] Availability as Security Objective - [00:18:59] Threat Modeling - [00:20:51] Continuous Threat Modeling - [00:23:59] Secure by Design - [00:26:56] Quality Attribute: Resilience - [00:31:14] Resilience and High Availability - [00:33:38] Resilience Techniques - [00:35:36] Allowing for Failures - [00:40:18] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:41:23] _____ Eoin Woods’s Bio Eoin is CTO at Endava, based in London. In previous professional lives, he has developed databases, created security software and designed way too many systems to move money around. Outside his day job, he is a regular conference speaker. He is interested in software architecture, software security and DevOps, and has co-authored a couple of books on software architecture. Follow Eoin: Website – https://eoinwoods.info/ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/eoinwoods/ Twitter – @eoinwoodz Continuous Architecture – https://continuousarchitecture.com/ Endava – https://www.endava.com/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/73.

“It is important to eliminate toil. If you don’t eliminate toil, you won’t have time to fix problems strategically, because strategic initiatives take precedence." Amrith Raj is a Senior Solutions Architect at Dynatrace. In this episode, Amrith walked us through the evolution and current state of IT Operations (ITOps). He described how the ITOps role has developed over time and becoming increasingly more challenging with the increased level of infrastructure abstraction and complexity, especially in the current era of cloud and Platform-as-a-Service. In order to manage such high amount of complexity, Amrith shared the importance of having good culture and practices and touched on some important Google SRE concepts, such as toil and automation. Amrith then shared some recent ITOps advancement, i.e. NoOps and AIOps, and how we can leverage on them to improve the way we solve problems. Also, make sure you do not miss Amrith’s pro tips on how we can become a better SRE and how to use Function-as-a-Service effectively. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:29] Managing Cloud Capacity - [00:07:51] IT Ops - [00:11:09] Cloud & Abstraction - [00:16:01] Culture & Toil - [00:18:54] NoOps - [00:28:29] AIOps - [00:31:20] Tips on AWS Lambda - [00:44:16] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:48:12] _____ Amrith Raj’s Bio Amrith Raj is a Senior Solutions Architect at Dynatrace, supporting the transformation journey of their highly diversified customers through automated and intelligent observability. He has authored an e-book on Cloud Capacity and has published papers related to Cloud, Data Centres and IT Infrastructure. He and members of the Cloud use cases group published a whitepaper called Moving to Cloud when Cloud Computing was too new to be adopted by companies. He has held multiple roles which involved responsibilities around leadership, engineering and operations, modernisation, cloud architecture, automation, migration and building fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure. Based in Melbourne, he is passionate about how technology can be used to transform human lives. Follow Amrith: Website – https://amrith.me/ Twitter – @amrith_raj LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/amrithrajr/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/72.

“Strategy is what earns. Use the strategic and innovative drivers to help us determine what our architecture needs to be. Architecture has to have a purpose." Vaughn Vernon is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and he recently co-authored his new book “Strategic Monoliths and Microservices”. In this episode, Vaughn shared his story and rationale for writing his new book and why he thinks it is important to include the executives as the readers of the book. He emphasized the importance of focusing on strategic innovative aspects of software development and for driving those innovations using purposeful architectures. Vaughn then shared his insightful perspective on Conway’s Law and why he compares it with the law of gravity. We then discussed two important architectural aspects covered in the book, which are events first architecture and embracing latency, and why they are actually natural to how people communicate and get things done in real life. Towards the end, Vaughn summed up his book and left an important piece of advice that he wanted to convey regarding monoliths vs microservices and why software should require more balance and demand a better strategy. Listen out for: “Strategic Monoliths and Microservices” Book - [00:06:32] Who Should Read the Book - [00:12:31] Strategic Learning and Experimentation - [00:16:48] Purposeful Architecture - [00:22:04] Conway’s Law - [00:27:24] Events First Architecture - [00:33:48] Embrace Latency - [00:38:54] Monoliths vs Microservices - [00:47:30] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:52:16] _____ Vaughn Vernon’s Bio Vaughn Vernon is an entrepreneur, software developer, and architect with more than 35 years of experience in a broad range of business domains. Vaughn is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design and reactive software development, and a champion of simplicity. Vaughn is the founder and chief architect of the VLINGO/PLATFORM, and he consults and trains around Domain-Driven Design, reactive software development, as well as EventStorming and Event-Driven Architecture, helping teams and organizations realize the potential of business-driven and reactive systems as they transform their businesses from technology-driven legacy web implementation approaches. Vaughn is the author of four best-selling books, as well as the curator and editor of his own Vaughn Vernon Signature Series, all published by Addison-Wesley. Follow Vaughn: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaughnvernon/ Twitter – @VaughnVernon Website – https://vaughnvernon.com/ Github – https://github.com/VaughnVernon VLINGO – https://vlingo.io DomoRoboto – https://domorobo.to/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/71.

“Delay design decisions until it’s necessary. Architecture is an art, not a science. Don’t architect for things you don’t know. Your design decisions should always be built on facts, not guesses." Pierre Pureur is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and an acclaimed software architect. In this second of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Pierre shared his own perspectives on the 6 key principles of continuous architecture. We then discussed in-depth the two important quality attributes, which are the scalability and performance. For each quality attribute, Pierre described the attribute definition, why it is an important architectural concern, and some of the common tactics used to improve the attribute in the modern system architecture. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:34] Architect Products, Not Projects- [00:07:31] Focus on Quality Attributes - [00:11:25] Delay Design Decisions Until Necessary - [00:13:41] Power of Small - [00:15:58] Architect for Build, Test, Deploy, and Operate - [00:17:40] Conway’s Law - [00:19:53] Essential Activities - [00:23:18] Quality Attribute: Scalability - [00:26:00] Scalability on The Cloud - [00:28:59] Scalability Tactic: Sharding - [00:31:01] Scalability Tactic: Asynchronous Communication - [00:32:58] Quality Attribute: Performance - [00:35:06] Measuring Performance - [00:37:23] Performance Tactics - [00:39:23] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:41:15] _____ Pierre Pureur’s Bio Pierre Pureur is an experienced software architect, with extensive innovation and application development background, vast exposure to the financial services industry, broad consulting experience and comprehensive technology infrastructure knowledge. His past roles include serving as Chief Enterprise Architect for a major financial services company, leading large architecture teams, managing large-scale concurrent application development projects and directing innovation initiatives, as well as developing strategies and business plans. He is coauthor of the book Continuous Architecture: Sustainable Architecture in an Agile and Cloud-Centric World (2015) and has published many articles and presented at multiple software architecture conferences on this topic. Follow Pierre: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierre-pureur/ Twitter – @PGP60 Website – https://continuousarchitecture.com/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/70.

“Successful project managers have a bias for action. They’re out there pushing the project forward all the time and doing all the things that need to be done to make the project successful." Jana Axline is the founder and Managing Director of Project Genetics, with over 20 years of experience in leadership, project, and portfolio management. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about the important role of project management. Jana explained how project management is still much relevant in the current era of agile and “project to product” movement within the tech industry. She outlined the important skill set required to become an effective project manager, how a project manager can earn much respect from the team, and pointed out some of the common project management anti-patterns we should avoid. She also gave her practical advice on how to do effective status report and project escalation. Towards the end, Jana gave her insightful perspectives based on her vast experience of why IT projects tend to have a high failure rate. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:06:05] Relevance of Project Management - [00:07:30] Project to Product Movement - [00:12:26] Skills of an Effective Project Manager - [00:14:41] Purpose vs Checklist - [00:18:23] Leaders vs Coordinator - [00:19:29] Earning the Respect - [00:21:20] Project Management Anti-Patterns - [00:23:26] Status Report - [00:26:54] Escalation - [00:29:36] Project Management Tools - [00:32:32] Tips for Project Management Career - [00:35:08] Tech Projects Failure - [00:37:59] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:40:31] _____ Jana Axline’s Bio Jana Axline is the founder and the Managing Director of Project Genetics. A focused leader and project manager, her expertise stems from more than 20 years of experience in leadership and almost ten years in project and portfolio management in many industries such as Health Insurance, Healthcare, Financial Services, Mining, Retail, Government, FMCG and Supply Chain Management. Jana was also the past president of the Project Management Institute Mile High Chapter. She speaks internationally on project management, employee engagement and leadership. She is an active PMP, ACP, Scrum Master, and Scaled Agilist and holds an MBA in Finance from the University of Colorado. Follow Jana: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/janaaxline/ Blog – http://www.janaaxline.com/ Project Genetics – https://projectgenetics.com/ Instagram – @projectgenetics Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/69.

“Many organizations think in order to be safe, they have to be slow. But the data shows us that the best performers are getting both. And in fact, as speed increases, so too does stability." Nathen Harvey is the co-author of 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report and a Developer Advocate at Google. In this episode, we discussed in-depth the latest release of the State of DevOps Report. Nathen started by describing what the report is all about, how it got started, and explained the five key metrics suggested by the report to measure the software delivery and operational performance. Nathen then explained how the report categorizes different performers based on their performance against the key metrics and how the elite performers outperform the others in terms of speed, stability, and reliability. Next, we dived into several new key findings that came out of the 2021 report that relate to documentation, secure software supply chain, and burnout. Towards the end, Nathen gave great tips on how we can use the findings from the reports to get started and improve our software delivery and operational performance, that ultimately will improve our organizational performance. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:28] State of DevOps Report - [00:09:32] The Five Key Metrics - [00:13:55] Speed, Safety, and Reliability - [00:19:58] Performers Categories - [00:23:26] 2021 New Key Findings - [00:28:01] New Finding: Documentation - [00:30:44] New Finding: Secure Software Supply Chain - [00:34:58] New Finding: Burnout - [00:37:22] How to Start Improving - [00:39:36] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:43:55] _____ Nathen Harvey’s Bio Nathen Harvey, Developer Relations Engineer at Google, has built a career on helping teams realize their potential while aligning technology to business outcomes. Nathen has had the privilege of working with some of the best teams and open source communities, helping them apply the principles and practices of DevOps and SRE. He is part of the Google Cloud DORA research team and a co-author of the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report. Nathen was an editor for 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know, published by O’Reilly in 2020. Follow Nathen: Twitter – @nathenharvey LinkedIn – https://linkedin.com/in/nathen Github – https://github.com/nathenharvey Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/68.

“As an architect, your main focus is to influence what’s running in production and to make sure you make the right decisions, so that you have a sustainable product." Murat Erder is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and the CTO of People and Procurement at Deutsche Bank. In this first of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Murat started by explaining what software architecture is and then explained in-depth the six principles of continuous architecture mindset. Murat continued by outlining the four essential activities of architecture that involve architectural decisions, technical debt, quality attributes, and feedback loops. Towards the end, we discussed the importance of data as an architectural concern. We touched on a few recent key data technology trends that impact and drive software architecture, including the importance of the data model as a prerequisite for successful software architecture. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:28] Software Architecture - [00:09:12] Six Principles of Continuous Architecture - [00:12:42] Focus on Quality Attributes - [00:17:56] Essential Activities - [00:19:16] Architectural Decisions - [00:21:55] Understand Technical Debt - [00:24:53] Data as an Architectural Concern - [00:29:33] Data Technology Trends - [00:32:10] Importance of Data Model - [00:37:20] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:39:46] _____ Murat Erder’s Bio Murat Erder is the CTO for People and Procurement at Deutsche Bank. His 25+ years of experience in the software industry range from software vendors, management consultancies, and large international banks, in which he worked as a developer, software architect, and management consultant. Murat’s main area of expertise is in data, integration, and architecture/CTO. Murat is the co-author of two books on software architecture, “Continuous Architecture: Sustainable Architecture in an Agile and Cloud-Centric World” and “Continuous Architecture in Practice: Software Architecture in the Age of Agility and DevOps”, and he has presented on this topic in several conferences, include SEI Saturn, O’Reilly Software Architecture and GOTO London. Follow Murat: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/murat-erder-62bb98 Twitter – @muraterder Website – https://continuousarchitecture.com/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/67.