"James Lewis is a programmer and Distinguished Engineer at ThoughtWorks based in the UK. He’s proud to have been a part of ThoughtWorks’ journey for over nineteen years and of its ongoing mission to deliver 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.
James defined the new Microservices architectural style back in 2014 along with Martin Fowler. James’ primary consulting focus these days is on helping organisations to align Technology Strategy with their organisational structures to improve their ability to get stuff done.
He is an internationally recognised expert on software architecture and design and on its intersection with organisational design and lean product development. As such he’s been a guest editor for IEEE Software, written articles, delivered training and spoken at more conferences than he can remember.
The early years of the second decade of the twenty-first century. A world where Docker was a job people did; K8S was a boyband (probably); Kafka was a euphemism for existential anxiety and Chaos Engineering meant, well, nothing as it hadn’t been invented yet. The Cloud … that was just weather to most people.
It is 2012, and Microservices appeared on the Thoughtworks Technology Radar. 10 years ago, in 2014, Martin Fowler and James Lewis wrote down something that caused a bit of a stir – the definition of Microservices. 10 years later, for better or worse, Microservices have become the predominant architectural style for building software at scale.
So much innovation has occurred in the last decade – Docker and K8S fulfilled the ‘write once and run anywhere’ promise of the JVM. Operations changed beyond recognition as we moved to Cloud Native and FaaS. Testing in Production is a practice that now signifies maturity rather than derangement.
In this keynote, James takes a look at the original nine characteristics of Microservices and explores the lessons we’ve learnt since those halcyon days. (Although Kafka is still a euphemism for existential anxiety.)
Have you ever thought about why what we see as the sensible defaults for software engineering in 2023 work? We adopt the key metrics from Accelerate, team structures from Team Topologies and Microservices in an effort to improve the flow of value to our users (or to a customer saying Thank You, paraphrasing Daniel Terhorst-North).
But what is Value? What is Flow? James will use ideas from Information Theory and Complexity Science to peek into the domain model of our everyday experiences turning ideas into running software. Come along and explore the weird world of how work works. Warning, may cause you to reduce batch sizes, because maths.
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