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• This is the first step beyond “I need to get it working”
• At this stage, you should be using practices like Test Driven Development (TDD) to enable good design

•    Solve a problem, and to solve a problem you have to understand the problem
•    Question your own design decisions
•    Design is wrong if it doesn’t respond well to change
•    Design is wrong if things that should be simple are really hard
•    Trick: Make as few decisions as possible
•    Soft skills not technical skills are more important at this level
•    Be able to listen to different opinions and parse out what matters

•    Multiple solutions/solution designs working in conjunction together
•    Can’t afford to get caught up in the detailed design of each solution
•    Recognize that not all systems are created equal (e.g. outhouse doesn’t need marble columns)
•    Read Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions

•     These are the 5 – 7 year projects that are highly complex and tied to large revenue opportunities
•     Requires a different set of patterns: domain logic patterns, data source architecture pattern, ORM, distribution patterns,
•     Have a goal of long term interoperability;  prevent the need for rewrites
•     Focus on emerging tech and prepare (e.g. in order to prepare for ML, start building a massive storehouse of data)
•     Need to know the implications and the systems that will come out of a choice and be able to capture the benefit and risk to the P&L
•     Promote consistency and avoid remaking decisions
•     Most importantly, do not endanger the business

I turned up this gem while looking for a list of common SOA anti-patterns: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/entarch/oea-soa-antipatterns-133388.pdf.

I appreciate the focus on needing to solve the organizational challenge around SOA as well as the technical challenges.  I’ve recapped the anti-patterns and the proposed solutions that I took away from the article below:

• From Application Silos to SOA Silos Anti-Pattern – Solution: Establish a center of excellence or an architectural review board that will ensure communication and interaction across teams.
• Build It and They Will Come – Solution: Establish an architecture review board that will clearly define the architectural roles and communication responsibilities for the various layers of IT execution and relevant artifacts.
• Over-Engineer Reference Architectures – Solution: Architectures should evolve along with business requirements. Adopt a just-enough, just-in-time architecture that reflects business requirements and available IT resources.
• Undefined Baseline for Business ROI – Solution: Plan and budget projects with value-based milestones, and include the right contingencies – including asking for help from outside experts.
• Web Service Sprawl – Solution: Be deliberate about the creation of enterprise services and govern the design of your service contracts.
• Armchair Architecture from the Ivory Tower – Solution: Always provide usable reference architectures. Be clear about their capabilities and limitations and how they should be used.  Validate your architecture rigorously.
• Scattered SOA Strategy Entangled with IT Strategy – Solution: Get and set expectations with absolute clarity when adding SOA to a project midstream.
• Expecting a Free Ride on the SOA Train – Solution: Embrace a maturity framework, build a shareable enterprise foundation, and invest in enterprise-wide training and adoption.
• Where’s the Money? Or SOA Equals EAI 2.0 – Solution: SOA is more than an ESB deployment and is not just a matter of using Web services for interfacing between systems.

Many thanks to Peter Heller for writing this article.

First off, I would like to thank Steve Smith, @ardalis, for encouraging me to go to CodeMash 2015.  Without him, I would have just written off CodeMash as a crazy conference for the locals in Cleveland, where people go to freeze.  But now I know differently.

Here is a list of my takeaways from CodeMash 2015:

• Man there are a lot of kind, fun, geeky, software engineering and technology enthusiasts in the world.  I am not alone!
• On day one, I spent half of the day working on creating a mobile friendly Web API for the Humitarian Toolbox project (github.com/htbox).  @billwagner and @tonysurma where there to help me get started, and I appreciated the introduction.  I spent the second half of the day brushing up on my SOLID C# skills creating a little RTS shoot’em up game on Mars.  Many thanks to Nicolas Martin who helped me during this session when I had some questions.  At the end of the day, I got to play Artemis and kick some Rebel butt.  All in all, a fulfilling day.
• On day two, I spent the entire day with @jenniferMarsman and @davidgiard learning how to create games for many different platforms using Construct.  I actually got so far as to create two levels of a game that I have high hopes for releasing to the Windows Phone app store among others.  Given that I have a day job, it will probably be a few months.  I can’t thank @jenniferMarsman enough for all the help and enthusiasm on this topic.  It is the most fun I have ever had at a conference (best session ever).  I got to round out the day by playing some Nuns on the Run (a board game) with some kindred spirits.
• On day three, I went to session after session with @williamklos getting me fired up about queuing strategies, @garyshort making data science look easy, @careypayette giving an IoT talk that made me want to fly back home to tinker more with my Galileo, and @theSeanOC giving me some great insights on how bit.ly achieves such great up time.  At the end of the day, I got to play a good long game of Caverna with the guys from DNSimple.  Does it get any better?

In summary, I would highly recommend the CodeMash conference. If my recap above sounds interesting to you at all, then I can guarantee you will have a great time, as I have a propensity for understatement. I know for myself that I’ll be back.