Architecture as the Organizing Logic for Components, and the Means for their Construction with Michael Nygard

In the latest episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim is joined by Michael Nygard, a senior vice president at Sabre and author of the bestselling Release It! Nygard has helped businesses and technology leaders in their transformation journeys over his long career and was even one of the inspirations behind The Unicorn Project’s protagonist, Maxine.

 

In their discussion, Kim and Nygard explore how we can enable thousands or even tens of thousands of engineers to work together toward common objectives, including the structure and dynamics required to achieve it. They also examine what truly great architecture looks like and the continuing importance and relevance of Conway’s Law.

 

Bio:

Michael Nygard strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers around the world. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Living with systems in production taught Michael about the importance of operations and writing production-ready software. Highly-available, highly-scalable commerce systems are his forte.

Michael has written and co-authored several books, including 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and the bestseller Release It!, a book about building software that survives the real world. He is a highly sought speaker who addresses developers, architects, and technology leaders around the world.

Michael is currently Senior Vice President, Travel Solutions Platform Development Enterprise Architecture, for Sabre, the company reimagining the business of travel.

 

• Twitter: @mtnygard
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtnygard/
• Website: https://www.michaelnygard.com/

You’ll Learn About:

• How to build great architecture for large teams.
• The real implications of Conway’s Law.
• Architecture as an organizing logic and means of software construction.
• Real-life stories of technology leaders’ transformation journeys.
• Decentralized economic decision making.
• The fear cycle and predictability.
• The after effects of the Yegge memo.
• A great definition of what great architecture is. 
• Leadership and the relationship between the business’ architecture and the technology architecture of the business.

RESOURCES

• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. Nygard
• Clojure programming language
• Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) operating system
• Totality Corporation
• The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen
• MCDP1: Warfighting
• Conway's law
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell
• The Fear Cycle by Michael T. Nygard
• State of DevOps Report
• DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020
• Coherence Penalty for Humans by Michael T. Nygard
• Michael Nygard on Cognicast podcast

 

TIMESTAMPS

 

[00:07] Intro

[02:12] Meet Mike Nygard

[04:36] What is TPF operating system?

[05:40] Finding the perspective to write Release It!

[11:07] Totality Corporation

[13:54] Moving large teams towards common objective

[18:37] Decentralized economic decision making

[19:52] The Principles of Product Development Flow

[23:38] Tale of two outages

[27:27] Distance incentive supply

[32:00] Architecture is one top predictors of performance

[35:05] Other attributes of good architecture

[39:19] The Fear Cycle

[43:40] An amazing finding in State of DevOps Report

[45:02] Amazon replatforming example

[50:35] The universal takeaways

[53:07] DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020

[54:55] Characteristics of reorganizations and structural changes

[1:00:00] Self-contained systems

[1:02:40] Mike’s definition of architecture

[1:07:13] Coherence Penalty for Humans

[1:10:10] Leadership’s responsibility to the architecture