It’s been very exciting to be part of the committee, along with the team at Skills Matter, behind a new, progressive conference for UBS bank in London titled UBSTechConf on the 13th and 14th November, 2014.

This is a new two-day conference dedicated to bringing in great speakers from the community as well as integrating a plethora of great speakers from within the bank itself. 

My talk will be on the new movements in architecture and design and, in particular, why they are coming about at all. Hopefully I'll get enough time to add a sprinkling of how to migrate to these new approaches as well.

It’s going to be a blast! Full respect to UBS for putting this together for their people.

Today I took the step to kill the tweets that get kicked out by SumAll around my twitter (and other) statistics. Originally I set this up with the view that it might be a neat little way of showing that there was some interest in what I was doing … but in truth what those tweets did was something far, FAR more embarrassing.

The thing is, those tweets really come across more like a whiny, high-pitched and hormone-charged teenager crying for attention rather than any reflection of popularity. I’m really not blaming SumAll for this, that service is great and provides some very helpful statistics to me, but the idea of sharing that information… and, worse, pushing it out to my followers as if that would give them a sense of ‘look how cool we are to be part of the vaguely popular following…’ just left me, and many of my followers, cold.

And so it was with no small relish that I enacted a simple log-in to SumAll and a change of my twitter preferences in order to kill off these ridiculous tweets for good. My apologies to those that got annoyed with those tweets, and many thanks to @marienborg for having the courage and sceptical sense to ask the important question "do you get any value from these tweets?…”; the answer was no, quite the opposite!

Here's what I'm up to this month (just follow the links if you'd like to know more or even sign-up for one of these events):

• 3-6 November, 2014: Riding to give one of my favourite public courses here in London, "Enterprise Integration with Spring"
• 7 November, 2014: Riding to give the Day 2 Keynote talk at the Spring eXchange
• 10-12 November, 2014: Riding to give my very own "Building Microservices" public course in London
• 13 November, 2014: Riding to and speaking at {develop:bbc} conference
• 13-14 November: Riding to, supporting and speaking at the new UBSTechConf conference at UBS bank
• 16-20 November, 2013: In Abu Dhabi doing a workshop on modern software development methods
• 26 November, 2014: Riding to a 1-day public taster pre-MuCon public tutorial I'm giving on Microservices
• 27-28 November, 2014: Riding to, hosting and keynoting the very first conference on Microservices, MuCon, in London

Hope to see you out on the road, or perhaps at one of these destinations!

I am just in the process of writing the design and architecture sections of my book on LeanPub, “Antifragile Software: Building Adaptable Software with Microservices”, and so I thought I’d drop some snippets of what’s coming here as well.

This part of the book aims to help you either migrate from a monolith or to approach a green field project while sensibly deciding on what components of your system need to be present, what granularity those components need to be, and which components would make good candidate micro services. To achieve this I use a diagrammatic tool I invented for just this purpose, the Life Preserver.

In software development, great diagrams can be judged according to two things:

• What questions they answer
• What questions they ask

The Life Preserver tool is a diagram that does the following:

• Helps you decide where your components goes
• Helps you decompose your components so that they can have a single responsibility
• Help you visualise how the pace of change affects the components in your system
• Helps you decide how de-coupled components in different areas of your application need to be based on the differences in speed and frequency of change.
• Helps you decide to spin-out microservices from your design to best effect.

To do this the Life Preserver is usually developed using the following main phases:

• Organise, Reduce and Encapsulate your components across your system’s architecture
• Group Components that change together, together
• Decide on the appropriate level of de-coupling between components
• Where useful, convert components into simple, event-driven components using CQRS strategies.
• Decide what components to implement Postel’s law within in service of the de-coupling of the contracts between components
• Decide which components make good candidate microservices that therefore need to be spun out into their code repositories so that they can be evolved at their own rate.
• Decide on the integration strategies and patterns that need to be applied between your microservices.
• Decide where micro service pipelines will help the comprehension and simplify your microservices.
• Decide objectively on the choices of implementation on a per-microservice basis

When you’re experienced with the Life Preserver these steps are not exactly sequential in terms of how they are applied. However for the purposes of the book, and to make it easier to learn them, they are presented in the book in sequence as we build a real-world system that needs to evolve at the speed of the surrounding business’ need to innovate and compete.

Another quick question for my bike-riding readers. I’m going to be covering a lot of miles next year on my wonderful 2014 Fatboy which I’m sure will be an absolute pleasure and epic fun to boot.

However on a recent warm-up ride to Rennes in France I noticed, on the ride from Rennes to Caen, that around 80 mph the wind gives you a thorough battering with the riding position of the bike. Yeah, I could just grin and bear it, but the point is to ride long-distance and enjoy it so … maybe a wind shield is an answer?

Thoughts in the comments please or just pop me a line at russ AT russmiles DOT COM

The Biker Software Monk, aka me, will be speaking at this years {develop:bbc} conference in November and I can’t wait!

In this talk I’ll be continuing my theme on antifragile software with
micro services, attempting to squeeze in as many real-world examples as possible in the 20-minute speaking slot.

Video of the talk will be made available on the BBC Academy website, so I’ll be sure to post here when things are done and published.

Ok, as the Biker Software Monk mission gets going for the coming year I have a question for my lovely readers. I've got a Harley and I'm going to be riding it round the UK, Europe and even taking up similar rental bikes overseas over the coming year. 

At the moment I have a perfectly good set of leather jackets, and I even have a waterproof set of trousers and over-jacket (think biker kay-in-a-bag) that works pretty well. What I don't have are leathers for my legs...

So, any recommendations out there? I could probably do with one set for when its wet and one set for when the weather is being kinder, but I'm open to the possibility that there might be something that's good for both. Style-wise, I'm riding a Harley ... something with skid pads on the knees is unlikely to look right (and also those pads are just not going to be used with my foot plates getting right in the way!).

I made an early 2015 New Years resolution to make much, MUCH more out of all the travel I do to clients and conferences. 

That resolution kicks in in earnest next week as I intend to full adopt the "Biker Software Monk" persona and ride to my Enterprise Integration with Spring course at Skills Matter, and then ride to the Spring eXchange where I'll be delivering a keynote on Friday.

Next year I'm looking to attend a couple of conferences, at least, in Europe and the US. Many more opportunities to get out on the roads and enjoy a slightly slower, more enjoyable time.

Be assured I'll be writing up my experience here as I spend a year being the full "Biker Software Monk". This should be fun!

At Simplicity Itself I’m often asked what the role of an ‘architect’ should be. For me, it all starts with principles that should be aligned with the particular needs and culture of an organisation.

That can all sound a bit woolly, so to make it a touch more concrete here is a set of starter-for-10 principles that I’ve seen used in a number of contexts by architects looking to encourage great things from the software that evolves out of their teams.

High level, organisational-style principles:

• Make the right things as easy as possible.
• Make unforeseen things, that might be needed, possible.
• Build Trust
• Promote Sharing
• Educate, educate, educate … and evolve those principles.

From a technical perspective, nothing beats:

• Immutability
• Separation of Concerns
• Following the Single Responsibility principle

After all, as I often tell my audiences:

• Human Comprehension is King
• Mechanical Sympathy is Queen (and the Queen sometimes gets her way over the King).

Of course you’ll have your own principles to discover and apply for your unique business context, but the point is that finding them is really crucial for helping you guide like a great architect.