Earlier this month I had the opportunity to visit Munich (Germany) to visit the Azure Community Day. Next to giving two talks myself, it was an opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones.

In the first session I talked about an architecture that I’ve been working on for a couple of years now. It’s a story about how an initial architecture that was completely by the book, turned out to be not a fit with the problem space. I took the audience along on a tour through this architecture, the challenges we encountered and how we overcame those / how we are planning to overcome them. This session is not recorded, and if possible I like to keep it this way if I ever give this session again. Use-case sessions are one of the great perks of visiting an in-person event. I would love to see more of these sessions on other events myself! For me and some members of the audience, most of the value came only after the session: in the hallway track. I thoroughly enjoyed this unexpected two-hour discussion about architecture, decision making, testing, release patterns and feature flags. Thanks all!

If you happen to be in Montreal this February, I will be giving the same talk at the ConFoo conference.

In the closing keynote I tried to challenge the audience on many of the beliefs in the field of software development. In particular: Scrum. When asking the question, I find that 75% – 90% of all engineers in the room are using Scrum as their main means for organizing their work. But when I ask why, its rare that I get even one real answer. “We’ve always done it that way,” “Better than waterfall,” etc etc – that I hear a lot. In this session I had the opportunity to challenge some of the Scum-related practices that I see everywhere and I believe are taking us away from one of the most critical activities in our work: thinking for ourselves.

All-in-all, a great way for ending the year. Thanks for the invitation!