Software Crafts Podcast

Marijn is the guest of this episode, and he brings his heuristic: Do NOT rewrite from scratch if it is in production (https://marijn.huizendveld.com/design-heuristics/do-not-rewrite-from-scratch-if-it-is-in-production). He gives examples of how to evolve software in production, reducing the risk of building the same thing in a new tech stack. We discuss how the software evolution is connected to the business model of an company, and seems a technical design, can even impact the revenue model.

Marijn recommends the following resources:

• https://www.eventstorming.com/: Learn more about EventStorming, which is a great way to talk with people outside of tech
• Introducing EventStorming by Alberto Brandolini - https://leanpub.com/introducing_eventstorming
• Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones • Simon Wardley • GOTO 2018
• A different take on (context) mapping - Marijn Huizendveld - DDD Europe 2020 Marijn Huizendveld
• How to relate your OKRs to your technical real-estate - Marijn Huizendveld
• http://hintjens.com/blog:94: Ten rules for Good API Design by Peter Hintjens
• https://marijn.huizendveld.com: Learn more about Marijn, and his perspective on software design

As a consultant, Marijn Huizendveld (@huizendveld) helps scale-ups in Europe apply Domain-Driven Design.

Our guest for this episode is Charity Majors. The pattern that serves as the stage for the episode is “Build Confidence” from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). Charity describes the infamous “death spiral”, where folks that produce code lack confidence in their processes and practices to deploy code to production. According to Charity, our job is not done until we close the feedback loop!

Charity also gives excellent advice regarding patterns and heuristics: to understand a pattern or heuristic, take one that you see working, and modify it. Learn what comes out of that!

Charity recommends:

• Honeycomb blog - https://www.honeycomb.io/blog
• Charity Majors blog - https://charity.wtf/
• Raw Signal newsletter - https://www.rawsignal.ca/newsletter
• Liz Fong-Jones Twitter - https://twitter.com/lizthegrey
• Jessica Kerr Twitter - https://twitter.com/jessitron

Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io, the original observability company.

In this episode, we host Marco Heimeshoff. The interview starts with the heuristic “Optimise for future potential” from the DDD Heuristics repository (https://www.dddheuristics.com/design-heuristics/optimise-for-future-potential/). Marco will take us through the journey of optimising for future potential, where he explains the need for boundaries as an enabler to optimise different parts of a system. We explore the idea of discovering boundaries and how semantics plays a crucial role in the discovery process.

Marco recommends:

• VirtualDDD.com
• DDD Crew @ GitHub - https://github.com/ddd-crew
• Domain Modeling Made Functional: Pragmatic Programmers: Tackle Software Complexity with Domain-Driven Design and F# by Scott Wlaschin
• KanDDDinsky conference - https://kandddinsky.de/

Marco Heimeshoff (@Heimeshoff) is a trainer, speaker and software developer from Germany. He organizes KanDDDinsky, a conference about Domain-Driven Design and the art of business software and co-founded the german DDD community in 2013 and VirtualDDD.com in 2019. Between consulting companies around the globe and building health care software, you'll find him speaking at conferences about DDD, socio-technical systems and first principles.

With over a decade of experience, he is helping teams to change and learn in all things from code to culture and to master Domain-Driven Design, agile software development, functional programming and CQRS with event sourcing.

In this week's episode, we host Alayshia Knighten. She is challenged with the “Manage inertia” pattern from the Simon Wardley Cotrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Manage_inertia). She shares how she manages expectations to manage inertia with their customers. For that time is needed! During our conversation, we discuss how we learn and what can we do to influence others to learn.

Alayshia recommends:

• Charity Majors blog (https://charity.wtf/)
• Invitation to Anthropology by Luke Eric Lassiter
• If you want to learn something, start to do experiments by yourself!

Alayshia is an Onboarding Engineering manager at Honeycomb who specializes in Observability and Production Excellence. She is also a modern-day hippie that simply enjoys getting "ish" done while "buzzing" around with customers, transforming their DevOps world.

Danyel Fisher (@FisherDanyel) is a User Data Expert for Honeycomb.io. He focuses his passion for data visualisation on helping SREs understand their complex systems quickly and clearly. Before he started at Honeycomb, he spent thirteen years at Microsoft Research, studying ways to help people gain insights faster from big data analytics.

• The case for developer experience by Jean Yang ( https://future.a16z.com/the-case-for-developer-experience/)
• Building for 99% developers by Jean Yang (https://future.a16z.com/software-development-building-for-99-developers/ )
• Gitpod (https://www.gitpod.io/)
• GitHub Codespaces (https://github.com/features/codespaces)
• Sourcegraph (https://about.sourcegraph.com/)

Phillip Carter (@_cartermp) is a Product Manager at Honeycomb, focusing on Developer Experience.

In this episode, we interview Heidi Helfand. She is challenged with the “Think aptitude and attitude” pattern from the Wardley Maps Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Think_aptitude_and_attitude). During the episode, Heidi shares her experiences in a learning environment and how it can be set up to allow emergence (doing it together). We also discuss how to harvest the potential by engaging people in problem-solving while allowing for variation.

Heidi recommends the following resources:

• The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins
• Leadership Is Language by David Marquet
• The Leader Lab by LeeAnn Renninger and Tania Luna

Heidi Helfand (@heidihelfand) is the author of the book Dynamic Reteaming and Vice President of Engineering at Kin Insurance.

We host Jessica Kerr for this episode. She is challenged with the heuristic “Commit to the direction, be adaptive along the path” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Commit_to_the_direction.2C_be_adaptive_along_the_path). She explains her own heuristic, “Having a quest” since often we are wrong about the path! The episode is a gold mine on heuristics, and there are a few more.

Jessica recommends the following resources:

• Learn Wardley Map (https://learnwardleymapping.com/)
• Honeycomb (https://www.honeycomb.io/)
• Introduction To Observability (https://www.honeycomb.io/obs101/)
• Obliquity by John Kay
• Games: Agency As Art by C. Thi Nguyen 

Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) is a developer advocate, software developer and symmathecist with 20+ years of experience. She has worked in enterprises and startups, in Java, Scala, Clojure, Ruby, and TypeScript. Talk to her about technical details, or about how to get software to teach us about its needs.

Abby recommends:

• Walking Skeleton: https://gojko.net/2014/06/09/forget-the-walking-skeleton-put-it-on-crutches/
• Pragmatic engineer newsletter: http://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/
• Quality coaching: https://www.annemariecharrett.com/tag/book/
• Hello stay sassy: https://stay-saasy-signup.ck.page/1cc4343737

Abby (@a_bangser) has ten years in the industry. Over half of this time as a tester, but the last bit was mainly in systems, platform and infrastructure testing, which led quickly into SRE. You can find her at a conference near you speaking about some of these topics!

Matt Lawrence is our guest, and he is challenged with the biggest heuristic so far: “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”, also known as “Jakob’s Law”. The heuristic is part of the “Jakob Nielsen Usability Heuristics” and can be found here: https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/.

Matt shares his experiences when it comes to usability, and what challenges you are faced when the system users are attached to a website. We discussed the different techniques that are valid to fulfil the user's needs when it comes to usability.

Matt recommends:

• UX Podcast - https://uxpodcast.com/
• UX Podcast Episode #235 - https://uxpodcast.com/235-internet-anxiety-david-swallow/
• Twitter as a source of knowledge
• W3 Schools - https://www.w3schools.com/
• CSS Tricks - https://css-tricks.com/

Matt Lawrence (LinkedIn) is the co-founder of Digital Dynasty Design in Canada.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
• You Are Not So Smart - https://youarenotsosmart.com/
• The “It's Just Like...” Heuristic - https://verraes.net/2021/05/its-just-like-heuristic/
• Exaptation & managed serendipity - https://thecynefin.co/exaptation-managed-serendipity-part-i/
• Domain-Driven Design Europe conference - https://dddeurope.com/

Mathias Verraes (@mathiasverraes) is the founder and consultant at Aardling and organiser of the Domain-Driven Design Europe conference.

• Samman Technical Coaching - https://sammancoaching.org/
• Approval Tests - https://approvaltests.com/
• Text Test - https://www.texttest.org/
• Dig Deep Roots Newsletter - https://www.digdeeproots.com/articles/on/legacy/

Emily (@emilybache) is a Technical Agile Coach with ProAgile. She is the author of "Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman method", a maintainer of Gilded Rose Refactoring Kata and other exercises and a frequent conference speaker.

In this episode, Anand Safi is our guest. Anand is challenged with the “Most Valuable First” pattern from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns repository (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). He starts to analyse value based on the different zoom levels: organisation, team and individuals. Anand explains the high degree of variance that the concept of value has. We end up discussing feedback cycles, psychology safety and OKR’s frameworks, and how all of it is connected.

Anand suggests to follow:

• Marty Cagan
• Esther Derby
• Simon Sinek

Anand (@anandsafi) is an Engineering Leader for Mark43 - a public safety software company. Over the past decade, Anand has progressed from starting as an aspiring engineer to becoming an engineering leader.

Anand also is a Startup Advisor, Volunteer Board Member and an established tech mentor/ coach outside of his role. He loves reading about engineering culture, team dynamics and new advancements in tech.

Jason Rosoff is the guest of this episode. We start the interview with the pattern “Personalized relationships for co-creation” from the Cloud Native Transformations repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/personalized-relationships-for-co-creation). Jason explains the difference between a complex and complicated problem and how psychological safety plays an essential role in innovation. He shares some examples of how some companies constraint the physical environment of their offices to create space for people to talk and share their ideas. During the interview, Jason explains how relationships can play an essential role for information to travel across a network, how organisations can enable it, and how managers and executives can read weak signals latent in their organisations.

Jason recommends the following resources:

• Radical Candor from Kim Scott
• Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter from Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown
• “You are not so smart” podcast (https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/) 

Jason Rosoff (@jasonrr) has a passion for building products and teams that scale. He believes teaching people to be better leaders is at the core of building anything great. As co-founder and CEO of Radical Candor, LLC, Jason helps teams at companies large and small build the best relationships of their careers and achieve amazing results.

Prior to Radical Candor, Jason spent seven years scaling Khan Academy from four people to hundreds as both chief people officer and chief product officer. Working in partnership with The Gates Foundation and Google, he helped Khan Academy improve educational outcomes for more than 100-million students and teachers worldwide.

Previously, Jason was a product leader at Fog Creek where he helped build the teams that created StackOverflow and Trello. Early in his career, Jason led engineering operations at a white-label producer of photo books for Apple. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in management from New York University.

Today, our guest is Liz Keogh. She is challenged with the heuristic “Ongoing Education‘ from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/ongoing-education). We discuss the learning at the individual, team and organisation levels. As the interview unfolds, Liz links Cynefin domains to the different learning styles, as well as BDD. In her words, BDD is all itself about learning!

Liz recommends:

• Wardley Maps (https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec) by Simon Wardley
• Crossing the river by feeling the stones (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW9L1uNMCs) by Simon Wardley
• Commitment: Novel about Managing Project Risk by Olav Maassen, Chris Matts and Chris Geray
• Cynefin for everyone by Liz Keogh (https://lizkeogh.com/cynefin-for-everyone/)

Liz Keogh (@lunivore) is a Lean, Agile and Cynefin consultant. She has roots in the BDD community, and she told us, she will be back to development work.

Andrea Goulet (@andreagoulet) is a sought-after keynote speaker for conferences around the world, empowering audiences to deepen their technical skills for understanding and communicating with others. She is best known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, a framework that helps software engineers anchor their decisions and deliverables on the perspectives of the people who will be impacted by what they create. Andrea is a co-founder of Corgibytes, a software consultancy that helps organizations pay down technical debt and modernize legacy systems. You can recognize her by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist and learn more about her work at https://empathyintech.com.

Dragan (@d_stepanovic) is based in Berlin and currently works as a principal engineer at HelloFresh. Typically on the search for better ways of working, exploring ends of the spectrums, and helping teams and organisations try out counter-intuitive ideas that initially don't make a lot of sense but end up as completely opposite of that.

It's been a long time since he fell in love with eXtreme Programming, Domain-Driven Design, and software as a craft (founder of Software Crafting Serbia community). In the last couple of years, he enjoys endless discussions connecting the Theory of Constraints, Systems Thinking, Lean and socio-technical topics.

Today we host Johanna Rothman, and she is challenged with the heuristic “Get the team in a rhythm” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/team-rhythm/). She starts explaining how the team rhythm and feedback cycles are connected and can strengthen each other. We discuss the role of a manager, and also how the managers should operate as a team, rather than be an extension of a team. Last but not the least, she shares her experiences with agile leadership, where it is necessary to move between discovery and delivery modes. And she left us with a heuristic, “Prune the decision tree”. Johanna recommends:

• Multiple shot feedback loops support innovation: https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2020/12/multiple-short-feedback-loops-support-innovation/
• The pretty link for all three Modern Management Made Easy books: https://www.jrothman.com/mmme
• The hiring book: https://www.jrothman.com/hiring
• Multiple short feedback loops support innovation: https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2020/12/multiple-short-feedback-loops-support-innovation/
• Some posts on management cohorts:
• https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2021/03/management-peer-cohort-vs-team-pairing-and-mobbing/
• https://www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/2021/01/create-your-peer-management-team-for-fun-and-profit-and-to-solve-problems/

Johanna Rothman (@johannarothman), known as the “Pragmatic Manager”, offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humour, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. Her most recent books are the Modern Management Made Easy series, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, and Create Your Successful Agile Project. Find the Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and her blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.

Monarch Wadia is our guest, and he is challenged with the heuristic “Master your tools” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/master-your-tools/). Monarch gives a different perspective to master the tools, which stems from his experience as a Bootcamp organiser. We discuss the differences between colleague and Bootcamp education and how the education paradigm shifts, at least with our industry. It was the start to go down the rabbit hole on how technology influences our culture and how we, humans, are changing our interaction patterns.

Monarch goes off script and recommends that we should decondition rather than discuss what we already know. 

Monarch Wadia (@monarchwadia) proudly identifies as a self-taught developer. He sees software programming as a democratic industry that welcomes everyone who seeks to enter it with open arms, provided they're willing to put in the hard work needed to learn the ropes.

He has led teams of more than 100 software engineers as a software architect, is the founder of two startups, and has nearly 10 years of experience in the industry. As Mintbean's CEO, he enjoys creating mentorship and career opportunities for newer web developers.

In this episode, Julie Lerman is our guest, and she is challenged with the pattern “Conserve familiarity” from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns repository (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). Throughout her career, Julie uses this pattern to be an enabler for conversations with people who use the systems. The talks are crucial to understanding the needs of people and how they use software that might be considered legacy but has a purpose. She shares her field stories, where Julie describes the patterns and techniques to maintain software that is expected to have a long lifetime.

Julie suggests the following resources:

• You are the most important resource!
• Domain-Driven Design books
• Domain-Driven Design Fundamentals course by Julie Lerman and Steve Smith (https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/domain-driven-design-fundamentals) 
• Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf) 

Julie Lerman (@julielerman) is a Microsoft Regional Director, Docker Captain and a long-time Microsoft MVP who now counts her years as a coder in decades.  She makes her living as a coach and consultant to software teams around the world. You can find Julie presenting on Entity Framework, Domain Driven Design and other topics at user groups and conferences around the world. Julie blogs at https://thedatafarm.com/blog, is the author of the highly acclaimed “Programming Entity Framework” books, the MSDN Magazine Data Points column and popular videos on Pluralsight.com.

Jeppe Cramon is the guest for this episode. He is challenged with the pattern “Make a Bridge to the New Town” from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns repository (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). Jeppe shares his experiences using this pattern, and we discuss the different technical implementations that can be used to migrate between systems. We dive into how we build systems and the different perspectives of people who create software and subject matter experts. Yes, we discussed eventual consistency and how we, people that make software, sometimes try to solve a problem that we don’t have.

Jeppe recommends the following resources:

• Event Modelling
• Greg Young DDD course, blogs and videos
• Udi Dahan Learn Advanced Distributed Systems Design, talks and videos
• Bill Poll blog

Jeppe Cramon (@jeppec) is a hands-on software architect and the founder of Cloud Create, where he helps customers build scalable and evolvable solutions. He has a passion for building loosely coupled event-driven systems.

Aviv Ben-Yosef is our guest for this episode. We will start with the heuristic “Dynamic Strategy”, from the Cloud Native Patterns (https://www.cnpatterns.org/strategy-risk-reduction/dynamic-strategy). Aviv explains different approaches from executives, namely CTO’s and VP of Engineering, linking to the impact they have on their organisations. From strategy to technology to people management, we discuss different patterns and how different organisations evolved.

Aviv recommends:

• The Tech Executive Operating System by Aviv Ben-Yosef
• Rands Leadership Slack
• Dev Interact Slack

Aviv Ben-Yosef (@avivby) is a tech executive consultant and author of the book “The Tech Executive Operating System”.

If you are curious about the guest, we are hosting Lea Kovac Beckman. She is challenged with the heuristic “Be curious” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/curiosity/). She describes how cycles of curiosity and boredom can foster innovation, what is the impact as persons, but also in this digital era, and how it impacts teams and organisations.

She shares how she uses innovation in her work and how curiosity and collaboration can be partners in finding a better solution rather than thinking in isolation.

Lea recommends the following resources:

Lea recommends the following resources:

• Curiosity: The Good, the Bad, and the Double-Edged Sword, by Christopher Bergland (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201608/curiosity-the-good-the-bad-and-the-double-edged-sword) 
• "Izzy, Did You Ask a Good Question Today?", from Isidor I. Rabi in New York Times" (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/19/opinion/l-izzy-did-you-ask-a-good-question-today-712388.html) 
• Why boredom is bad... and good for you, from David Robson, (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20141218-why-boredom-is-good-for-you) 
• The Importance of Being Bored in a Digital Age, by Alec Sears (https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-importance-of-being-bored-in-a-digital-age/) 
• Conscious competence learning model by psychologist Noel Burch
• The Flexibility of the Four Stages of Competence by Jared Spool (https://articles.uie.com/four_stages_competence/) 
• Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

Lea (@leakovac) is an independent UX Design consultant with a focus on user research and strategy. Together with product teams she has for many years developed digital services and tools for leading Swedish media companies like the Swedish Television and Bonnier News. She enjoys working closely with journalists, an environment where you are rewarded for asking questions.

Essential to her work is bringing different perspectives and skillsets together in all parts of the work process, in reaching a common set goal – both in discovery and delivery. She's experienced that the whole team approach mindset is more innovative, effective and exciting. It enables you to learn about, understand and affect areas that would otherwise be out of reach an

Einar Høst is the guest of this week. He is challenged with the heuristic “It’s easier to keep a system working than to fix it after you break it” from the Embedded Artistry repository (https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2018/04/26/embedded-rules-of-thumb/). Einar describes how feedback cycles are critical to keeping a system working and how complex systems evolve from simpler systems, connecting both, how our engineering practices can support a reliable software development process.

Einar shares the pivotal moment in his career with us where he realised that collaboration was vital for success in the software industry. 

Einar recommends:

• Data and Reality: A Timeless Perspective on Perceiving and Managing Information in Our Imprecise World by William Kent
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

Einar W. Høst (@einarwh) is a software developer at NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster. He enjoys domain modelling, API design and computer programming. He thinks that programs should be written for people to read and also for machines to laugh at.

This week, Peter Maddison is our guest, and he is challenged with the heuristic “Measure what matters” from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/strategy-risk-reduction/measure-what-matters). We discuss how to measure value and what techniques can be helpful to define metrics for teams creating and delivering software. We discuss how to expand towards measuring organisational performance and the impacts of different industry trends on our profession. He suggests starting measuring what matters: go and ask!

Peter recommends:

• How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/444653.How_to_Measure_Anything) 
• Escape Velocity by Doc Norton (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41046439-escape-velocity---better-metrics-for-agile-teams) 
• Measuring Outcomes... or how to get meaningful metrics with Gino Marckx (https://www.elevatechange.co/shareable/measuring-outcomes-or-how-to-get-meaningful-metrics-with-gino-marckx/) 
• Our Xodiac blog posts on metrics (https://xodiac.ca/blog/tags/metrics) 
• Focused Objectives GitHub repo - Lots of useful spreadsheets (https://github.com/FocusedObjective/FocusedObjective.Resources/tree/master/Spreadsheets) 

Peter Maddison (@pgmaddison), coach and consultant with over 20 years of experience n helping organisations improve and thrive.

Andrew Harmel-Law is our guest of this week, and he will share his experiences over the heuristic “Maximize cohesion, minimize coupling” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/maximize-cohesion-minimize-coupling/). We start discussing the original scope of the heuristic, the software code, but quickly expand to his experiences with cohesion and coupling at the organisation level.

We discuss how the communication pathways can enable and harm an organisation, and how the knowledge silos can be broken. Andrew shares his architecture practices, namely how to move between the Domain-Driven Design strategic patterns to the tactical patterns, crossing the different organisation layers effectively. 

Andrew recommends the following resources:

• Domain-Driven Design, Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans
• Happy Path Programming podcast by Bruce Eckel and James Ward
• Test-Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck

Andrew Harmel-Law (@al94781) is Tech Principal at ThoughtWorks and a Domain-Driven Design enthusiast. He is a public speaker and O’Reilly author.

This week on our show, we have Niranjani! She will share her opinion and experiences about the heuristic “Sleep easy on a green build” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/no-broken-builds/). We discuss her recent journey, where continuous improvement based on a green (or red) build drove the teams to find solutions to guarantee the quality of the product, and at the same time the speed of shipping features. From automated testing to observability and A/B testing test data challenges, she shares how the practices evolved over time.

Niranjani recommends the following resources:

• Leading Quality - How Great Leaders Deliver High Quality Software & Accelerate Growth from Ronald Cummings-John & Owais Peer
• Team Topologies - Organizing business and technology teams for fast flow from Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
• Liz Fong-Jones blog (https://www.lizthegrey.com/) 
• Andrew Bosworth blog (https://boz.com/) 

Niranjani (@RanjaniRambles) is an enthusiastic engineer passionate about writing code to break applications! She has worked at both startups and well-established companies like eBay, Twitter, Pinterest and now Lyft. She strives to strike a balance between being a workaholic and a wanna-be-traveller who is open-minded but still likes to believe unicorns are real!

Ken Power is challenged with the heuristic “Use a systematic mechanism of learning” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Use_a_systematic_mechanism_of_learning). He shares how he learns, with structure and unstructured approaches, and also how teams and organisations can learn. Our discussion goes into complex adaptive systems, different patterns, and how learning is one of the qualities present in resilient organisations. Last but not least how complexity and mapping can go hand-in-hand.

Ken recommends the following resources:

• Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime from Sean Carroll
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life from Mark Manson
• 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results from Esther Derby
• The Heat of the Moment: Life and Death Decision-Making From a Firefighter from Sabrina Cohen-Hatton
• Lex Fridman Podcast (https://lexfridman.com/podcast/)
• Rasa Chat‪s
  

Ken (@ken_power) is an engineering leader with more than 20 years’ experience in software engineering. His current focus is working with intelligent autonomous systems, including software for self-driving cars and edge devices.

His focus is the intersection of people, product development, strategy, architecture, leadership, agility, and engineering culture.

Ken is an independent consultant and product developer. In addition, he holds a research fellowship with Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre, where his current research focus is connected autonomous vehicles. He is also an associate lecturer with the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he teaches strategy & planning, systems analysis & design, and large-scale transformation.

Ken has held multiple technical and leadership positions in organizations, ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. He was with Cisco for 11 years, where he served as Principal Engineer and Engineering Director with multiple global business units.

Ken has authored more than 35 peer-reviewed publications on software engineering topics, including winning the IEEE Software best paper award.

He is a speaker at leading international conferences on architecture, software engineering, agile, and lean product development, and regularly serves as a conference organizer and program committee member. He was co-editor of the 2019 IEEE Software special issue on Large-Scale Agile Development.

Ken has a B.Eng. in Software Engineering, a MSc in Artificial Intelligence, and a PhD in comple

 A new episode is out, and today we feature Dawn Ahukanna (@dawnahukanna). She is challenged with the heuristic “Your solution should not be more complicated than the problem” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/kiss/). We discuss what solution vs problem space needs, and how different disciplines complement each other in order to deliver value. Dawn shares with us what are the heuristics that allow people with different perspectives to cross their paths to solve a complex problem.

Dawn recommends the following resources:

• As-is scenario mapping (https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/toolkit/activity/as-is-scenario-map)
• To-be scenario mapping (https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/toolkit/activity/to-be-scenario-map) 
• Service Blueprint (Sequence diagram for people and interactions) (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/service-blueprints-definition/)
• Cynefin framework (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework)
• Wardley maps (https://medium.com/wardleymaps)

Dawn Ahukanna (@dawnahukanna) is a Design Principal at IBM Design. She's always been curious about how "things" work, taking things apart and trying, failing, learning, trying again, failing, trying again and finally putting them back to together. Sometimes, making completely new things in the what should have been a re-assembly process.

She started her career as a Chemical Engineer, taking things apart at the atomic level and figuring out how they worked. Then simulating and emulating abstract models by developing and programming software. Finally progressing to figuring out how people work, without taking them apart or simulating, as a Design Principal and Front-End Architect.

Her mission: To design, develop and deliver digital user experiences that hopefully delight, definitely enables or at least don't frustrate, the clients and users.

This week, Steve Pereira will be challenged with the heuristic “Remove bias and duplication” from the Wardley Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Remove_bias_and_duplication). We will discuss different contexts where duplication can hinder or accelerate, and the importance of value streams. He shares his experiences about using weak signals to detect friction within organisations, helping them to reorganise to enable the flow.

Steve recommends the following resources:

• Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation by Karen Martin and Mike Osterling
• Value Stream resources at https://visible.is/#thinking 
• Mastering Software Delivery with Value Stream Management from Jeff Keyes

Steve (@SteveElsewhere) is a DevOps enthusiast and an expert in software team performance with more than 20 years of experience. His main focus during all these years has been on using mapping techniques to guide ambitious and struggling teams towards their true north.

He is the founder of the consulting firm "Visible" where he coaches teams to boost flow and value using his 4 Key Maps of DevOps. Previously, he has been founding CTO of Statflo, build and release engineer, and a lifetime workflow automator. He also leads the 6500+ member Toronto DevOps community with a regular meetup, events, and annual conference. Being also an agency consultant, finance IT manager, and a tech support phone jockey, he is focused on the flow of value, all the time.

In this episode, our guest Trond Hjorteland is challenged with the heuristic “Complex systems evolve out of simple systems that worked” from Embedded Artistry repository (https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2018/04/26/embedded-rules-of-thumb/). We discussed how communication is important, and moving from the big picture to code and back. He shares the techniques and practices to have crucial discussions with people with different perspectives involved in the creation of software.

Trond recommends the following resources:

• Anything from Umberto Eco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco)
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
• Ackoff's Best: His Classic Writings on Management by Russell l. Ackoff
• The Infinite Monkey Cage podcast
• The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast

Trond (@trondhjort) is an IT architect and aspiring sociotechnical systems designer from the consulting firm Scienta.no and has many years experience with large, complex, and business-critical systems, primarily as a developer and architect on middleware and backend applications. His main interests are service-orientation, domain-driven design, event-driven architectures, and sociotechnical systems, working in industries like telecom, media, TV, and public sector. Mantra: Great products emerge from collaborative sensemaking and design.

“Design for constant evolution” is the heuristic for our guest, Edzo Botjes. The heuristic is part of the Simon Wardley Doctrine repository (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Design_for_constant_evolution). Edzo discusses resilient and antifragile systems as part of his research. We discuss how organisations are addressing these topics, and what are the current market needs, given that it is a complex topic.

Edzo suggests:

• Foundations of Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering from Jan A.P. Hoogervorst
• Rethinking the Fifth Discipline from Robert Louis Flood

Edzo Botjes (@edzob) is an Enterprise Engineer with more than 15+ years’ experience. He believes that Enterprise Engineering covers Enterprise Architecture and the skills needed to implement innovation, governance, and architecture realistically. This implies that Group Psychology, IT Security Architecture, Technology Innovation, and Ethics are a few topics that should be included in the developing strategy and architecture.  In 2020 Edzo wrote his Master titled "Defining Antifragility and the application on Organisation Design” and graduated with the highest distinction.

Edzo is currently working on the new version of DYA, a view on Enterprise Architecture. Edzo is since this year part of Xebia Security with specialisation on the resilient organisation.

New year, new episode. Mykola Gurov is the first guest of the year, and we challenge him with the heuristic “Diagnose before cure” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/diagnose-before-cure/). Mykola shares his opinion about observability and the importance to challenge our assumptions and bias. Focus on the purpose of the software rather than the technical details. We discuss testing in production, the different techniques to be effective, reduce the feedback cycle, and do it safely. We end up talking about the differences between traditional approaches to testing software versus modern ones.

Mykola recommends:

• Unit testing is overrated blog post by Alexey Gulob (https://tyrrrz.me/blog/unit-testing-is-overrated)
• Testing of Microservices blog post by André Schaffer (https://engineering.atspotify.com/2018/01/11/testing-of-microservices/)

Mykola (@ngurov) is a software engineer. Working at bol.com since 2015. Mostly within “feature delivery” teams (logistics, supply chain) with occasional detours towards platform development. He is a proponent and adopter of rapid feedback techniques in software development: thorough functional testing in development; progressive feature delivery and trunk-based development; testing on production (shadow and live). On the technical side, he is a believer in micro-services; preference for higher-tier testing instead of heavy use of mocks.

Today Laveena Ramchandani will share her experiences about the heuristic “Tests should be fast, reliable and independent” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/independent-tests/). We discuss how to combine these 3 qualities to the test practices. We deep dive into the field of Data Science, and how test practices can be applied or re-think to deliver software with high levels of excellence.

Laveena recommends the following resources:

• How to avoid the testing Swiss Cheese Syndrome by Marc Rambert (https://conference.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/avoid-testing-swiss-cheese-syndrome/)
• The Tester's Pocketbook by Paul Gerrard

• Accelerating Software Quality: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the Age of DevOps by Eran Kinsbruner
• Laveena Ramchandani blogs (https://laveenaramchandani01.medium.com/) 

Laveena (LinkedIn) is working in Tech for over 7 years now. Her expertise is in software testing and quality assurance, a good mix of both technical and business awareness. She has learnt a lot through her career and is looking forward to gaining more knowledge and at the same time inspiring more testers around the world.

This week we feature Melissa Benua as our guest. She will share her experiences and opinion about the heuristic “Distribute power and decision making” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Distribute_power_and_decision_making).

She will share her heuristics to move between different leadership styles, such as Command and Control and Misson Command. We discuss the merits of the different styles, as well as how a manager can sense and discuss it with the people and the teams. We end up with the differences between an enterprise and a scale-up, and the trade-offs for a manager. 

Melissa recommends:

• State of DevOps report - https://cloud.google.com/devops 
• Accelerate book from Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim

Melissa Benua (@queenofcode) has worked in nearly every software development role—dev, test, DevOps, and program management—at companies big and small and somewhere in-between. She's created and run high availability, high-quality services for PlayFab, Bing, Cortana, and Xbox One, and now for mParticle's enormous data platform. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while growing the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing significant code churn. Now a director of engineering with mParticle, she’s passionate not only about maximizing efficiency both in her product code and in her developer tools but also about sharing best practices among colleagues and the tech world at large. 

Gitte Klitgaard is our guest. She will tell us her experiences and practices with the pattern “Blameless inquiry” for the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/blameless-inquiry). We will explore the different behaviours at a team and individual level, and how we can nurture a healthy culture. We discuss some tabu topics, such as mental health; what should organisations pay attention to, and how to act in order to protect people.

Gitte recommends:

• Amy Edmonson - Building a psychologically safe workplace (https://diversity.lbl.gov/2019/09/24/tedx-talk-on-psychological-safety/)
• Brené Brown - The power of vulnerability (https://brenebrown.com/videos/ted-talk-the-power-of-vulnerability/)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
• Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler 

Gitte (@nativewired) has been an agile coach at leading companies like Spotify, LEGO and IBM for more than a decade and has been independent since 2013. Her main focus in the last years have been communication and implementing psychological safety as well as responsibility and accountability. It is essential for Gitte to be authentic, to cut to the chase, and help people become themselves, so they can succeed at work and outside.

She also spends time being a speaker, mentor, and trainer and have so far keynoted on three continents - often about the things that we forget to talk about.

Gitte describes herself as “curious, hippie, friend, hugger, geek and learner”

This week Manuel Pais is our guest. We challenge him with the pattern “Internal Evangelism” from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/internal-evangelism). How the different Team Topologies archetypes and their relationship with this pattern. Our conversation goes into the necessary skills to be an influential evangelist, what a team should do from an evangelism point of view, and also to the management traits. 

Manuel recommends:

• Team Topologies Book: https://teamtopologies.com/book 
• Thoughtworks enabling team case study: Chapter 5, Page 88
• IBM enabling team case study: Chapter 7, Page 146
• Platform internal "evangelism" at HelloFresh: https://engineering.hellofresh.com/advocating-for-a-product-mindset-within-platform-teams-and-how-we-do-it-at-hellotech-part-1-fc1fbf8ae015
• Platform branding example from NAV's platform team: https://nais.io/

Manuel Pais (@manupaisable) is co-author of Team Topologies: organising business and technology teams for fast flow. Recognised by TechBeacon as a DevOps thought leader, Manuel is an independent IT organisational consultant and trainer, focused on team interactions, delivery practices and accelerating flow. Manuel is also a LinkedIn instructor on Accelerating Continuous Delivery in the Enterprise.

This week Xin Yao is our guest. She will share her opinion about the heuristic “Think Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, and Elegant (FIRE)” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Think_Fast.2C_Inexpensive.2C_Restrained.2C_and_Elegant_.28FIRE.29). We navigate between the four principles and Xin’s experience as a sociotechnical architect. She shares her experiences within a sociotechnical system, and what is changing in the role of a software architect.

Xin recommends the following resources:

• The Simplicity Cycle: A Field Guide to Making Things Better Without Making Them Worse by Dan Ward
• Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides) by Marshall B. Rosenberg
• Learn Wardley Mapping (https://learnwardleymapping.com/) 
• Virtual DDD (https://virtualddd.com/) 

Xin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/xinxin/ and @xin_yy)  is a sociotechnical software architect in Danske Bank. She explores Domain-Driven Design in her organisation's IT modernisation journey from a mainframe-centric landscape to cloud-based services. 

She regularly facilitates collaborative domain modelling workshops, using visual discovery techniques such as event storming and Wardley Mapping to co-create shared domain understanding and link to customer value. She is particularly curious of whether blending DDD into her org's current agile transformation initiative can give its habitual top-down architecture gestation culture a gentle nudge toward a democratic metamorphosis. Xin dreams of and works on elevating software architecture to a communication tool cross disciplines, owned and evolved by agile teams organically.

New week, new episode. And the guest is Khaled Souf, and I challenge him with the heuristic “Split functionality into small units” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/thirty-minute-methods/). Khaled will explain how he approaches software, and what are the tools, practices and techniques that he uses to deliver value. We also discuss inclusion and diversity as a critical aspect for organisations to strive!

Khaled recommends:

• Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce
• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans
• Patterns, Principles, and Practices of Domain-Driven Design by Scott Millett and Nick Tune
• DDD Crew GitHub repo (https://github.com/ddd-crew)
• The Software Craftsman: Professionalism, Pragmatism, Pride by Sandro Mancuso
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Khaled (@khaledsouf) is a passionate Senior dev/trainer/coach/DDD Distiller based in Montréal. He has been working for several years in Paris (France). He is also an organiser of the Software Crafters Montréal Meetup and the Unconference SOCRATES Canada. Currently, he works at Zenika Montréal as a senior consultant.

Sander is the guest of this week. We will share his experiences with the pattern “Reproducible development environments” from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/development-design/reproducible-dev-environments). Sander will teel his experience from software engineer to tech director, and his path to be pragmatic. We discuss the benefits of automation to onboard new people into teams, where they can feel included, and contribute to the product.

Sander recommends the following resources:

• Talking with Tech Leads: From Novices to Practitioners from Pat Kua
• Follow Pat Kua on Twitter
• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders from L. David Marquet

Sander (@codenizer) is Tech Director for Jedlix. Over the last decade, he worked in different countries, ranging from banking to e-commerce industries. Sander is also public speaker, blogger and amateur athlete.

Parveen Khan is our guest! This episode she will give her opinion and experiences about the heuristic “You get what you measure” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/what-you-measure/). She will share how she measures her goals to drive her career, and how she fell in love with Observability. We discuss how the role of a tester changed across the last decade, and how siloed communities started to pivot to join efforts around common concerns for teams that create software.

Parveen recommends:

• O11y Cast (https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/o11ycast/) 
• Ministry of Testing (https://www.ministryoftesting.com/)
• Test Automation University (https://testautomationu.applitools.com/) 

Parveen (@Parveen_Khan10) is a Senior Test Engineer at Square Marble Technology. Being a quality advocate, she believes delivering high-quality products is everyone's responsibility. She loves collaborating with teams and optimising processes, tools and methodologies to enable the creation of high-quality products. She is also an international speaker sharing her stories and experiences in testing to inspire other people around the globe. In her spare time, she plays the role of wonder woman for her two lovely kids. You can connect with her on Twitter - @Parveen_Khan10 and read her stories at https://www.parveenkhans.com/.

And a new episode is out. This week our guest is Ben Mosior, and we will ramble about the heuristic “Prefer rich modes of communication” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/rich-communication/). Our discussion will be centre on communication, from synchronous to asynchronous, from visual to verbal. Ben will share his opinion on the effects on bad communication in sociotechnical systems, and how good communication, such as Wardley Maps, can have a positive effect to get focus, from individual to organisation level.

Ben recommends:

• Learn Wardley Mapping (https://learnwardleymapping.com/)
• Working with Stories in Your Community Or Organization: Participatory Narrative Inquiry from Cynthia Kurtz (https://www.workingwithstories.org/) 

Ben (@hiredthought) is an indie consultant who teaches Wardley Mapping and other ways to do stuff on purpose. Creator of the Learn Wardley Mapping (https://learnwardleymapping.com/)  website, he is also a blogger, podcaster, trainer and public speaker!

Pat Kua is our guest for this episode. He will share his thoughts on the pattern “Decide Closest to the Action” from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/decide-closest-to-the-action). We will discuss technical leadership and management. What that means for a technical management role, and what are the pitfalls, and how to create a healthy environment.

Pat recommends “Thinking in System” by Donella Meadows.

Patrick Kua (@patkua) is a seasoned technology leader with almost 20 years of experience. His personal passion is accelerating the growth and success of tech organisations and technical leaders. He has had many years of hands-on experience, leading, managing and improving complex organisations and software systems as the CTO and Chief Scientist of N26 (Berlin, Germany) and as a Technical Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. He is a frequent keynote and conference speaker, author of three books including The Retrospective Handbook, Talking with Tech Leads and Building Evolutionary Architectures and runs the free popular newsletter for leaders in tech, “Level Up” (http://levelup.patkua.com) and the Tech Lead Academy, offering online training for technical leaders. You can find him online on twitter as @patkua or running his very popular “Shortcut to Tech Leadership” workshop.

In this week’s episode, we have Nick Tune as our guest. He will rumble about the heuristic “The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.” from the Embedded Artistry repository (https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2018/04/26/embedded-rules-of-thumb/). We discuss how software design is affected by the environment, and how can we cope with that pressure. He also shares his heuristics to improve collaboration, and how silver bullets can damage our culture.

Nick recommends:

• Follow Ruth Malan on Twitter (@ruthmalan)
• Team Topologies from Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
• Wardley Mapping (https://medium.com/wardleymaps)

Nick (@ntcoding) is The Connector of Dots. Keynote speaker, author of several books, and community leader, he is involved with the Domain-Driven Design community.

Jessy Halison is our guest for episode 18. She will share her experiences about the pattern "Manage for Creativity from Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/manage-for-creativity). We will discuss organisational models, and how psychology safety is key for teams and individuals to grow. She also describes how inclusion and diversity are key to a creative environment.

Jessy recommends:

• Non-violent communication: https://www.nonviolentcommunication.com 
• Bunch.ai: https://bunch.ai/ (access to their "Teams@Work" community: https://bunch.ai/slack-community) 
• Radical Candor, by Kim Scott: https://www.radicalcandor.com/the-book/ 
• Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org/ 

Jessy (@JessyFanja) is a QA Engineer with more than 10 years turned Engineering Manager, with people well-being at heart. She works for a socially conscious company: Ecosia, the search engine which plants trees.

In this episode, Tobias Goeschel shares his experiences with the pattern “Strangle Monolith Application” from Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/development-design/strangle-monolithic-application). From the software crafting practices to his own bias, we chat about how he learns, and how we can advance our profession.

Tobias recommends:

• Domain-Driven Design community
• Software Crafting community
• DDD Europe conference - https://dddeurope.com/ 
• KanDDDisnky conference - https://kandddinsky.de/ 
• SoCraTes conferences - https://www.socrates-conference.de/home  
• Mob Programming
• Collaborative modelling
• EventStorming - https://www.eventstorming.com/ 
• Virtual DDD - https://virtualddd.com/ 

Tobias (@w3ltraumpirat) a Principal Consultant at codecentric, specialising in all things Software Crafting,  Domain-Driven Design and DevOps. He is older than he looks.

In this episode, Lisa Crispin shares her experiences with the pattern “Delayed Automation” from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/development-design/delayed-automation). We discuss the different trade-offs of applying it, based on different contexts. I also ask a long-time question: What can we learn from donkeys? If you are curious why, donkeys are Lisa’s brand!

Lisa recommends:

• Quality Coaching Roadshow podcast from Anne-Marie Charrett
• Accelerate book from Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim
• Leading Quality book from Ronald Cummings-John and Owais Peer

Lisa Crispin (@lisacrispin) is the co-author, with Janet Gregory, of three books: Agile Testing Condensed: A Brief Introduction, More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team, Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams; the LiveLessons Agile Testing Essentials video course, and “The Whole Team Approach to Agile Testing” 3-day training course offered through the Agile Testing Fellowship. Lisa was voted by her peers as the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person at Agile Testing Days in 2012. She is co-founder with Janet of Agile Testing Fellowship, Inc.  Please visit www.lisacrispin.com, www.agiletestingfellow.com, and www.agiletester.ca for more. Lisa is currently a Fellow Quality Owner at OutSystems, helping with the observability practice.

In this week episode, Andra Sonea is telling us when she focuses on the specific problem or distils the general solution. She will share her experiences based on the heuristic “Solve the specific problem, not the general case” from the Embedded Artistry repository (https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2018/04/26/embedded-rules-of-thumb/). We will discuss how-to share mental models with a team, even during pandemic times. From her experience in finance, we will dive into the patterns in an organisation change, with the different pitfalls. She will end up describing her unconventional approach to tech!

Andra recommends the 99% invisible podcast (https://99percentinvisible.org/).

For the past twenty years, Andra (@andrasonea) found herself working with banking and insurance technology. It was not called Fintech then, and it was not so cool as it is now. During this time she built systems, maintained systems made by others, worked on many so-called "transformations", advised start-ups and C-level executives of large banks on "next steps" & strategy. Left by herself, she likes to untangle complicated stuff. She spends her time between FintechOS, a scale-up she joined this year and her PhD in Urban Science at the University of Warwick.

In this episode, Julius Gamanyi is the guest. We will discuss the longest heuristic so far: “Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though” from Embedded Artistry repository (https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2018/04/26/embedded-rules-of-thumb/). We discuss how we can balance our experiences, from a personal, team and organisational point of view. We deep dive into the way that an IT architect supports teams into the decision-making process, balancing the trade-offs.

Julius recommends:

• Wardley Maps - http://wardleymaps.com
• Wardley Maps book - https://medium.com/wardleymaps

Julius (@juliusgb2k) is a Technology Architect at Accenture, having started there ten years ago as a Software Developer. He's still developing Software, mainly with Java. He's been wearing the Security Champion's hat too. As for the industry, he's currently working in Payments. Before that, he was in Public Services, Retail, and Transportation.

He enjoys a good book and is a fan of Wardley Mapping with all it entails. He blogs about once a month on his website (https://juliusgamanyi.com) and tweets at https://twitter.com/juliusgb2k.