Systems thinking is the macro behaviour that we must understand in analyzing our world. A system always produces what it is designed to do, even if that isn't at all what we meant it to do!

Systems are self-maintaining, and contain balancing and/or reinforcing feedback loops.

We'll look at how these work, and what happens when they fail. You'll see how to apply systems thinking to the systems that are all around us.

This is an introductory talk to the world of Systems Thinking, condensed into 45 mins plus time for questions at the end.

The strongest tech skills don’t necessarily guarantee success. To get the best from those around you—and maximize your own influence—you need to boost your tech skills with soft skills. Luckily, small changes in the way you work can produce big results.
In this free webinar, Jacqui Read, author of Communication Patterns: A Guide for Developers and Architects, takes you on a whistle-stop tour of patterns and techniques to improve your visual, verbal, nonverbal, written, knowledge, and remote communication skills. You’ll learn communication soft skills tuned specifically to a technical audience, which you can easily integrate into your existing workflows for quick and transformative results.
You’ll learn how to:

    Use soft skills to boost your technical skills
    Explore visual, nonverbal, written, knowledge, and remote communication skills
    Integrate communication soft skills into your everyday workflow for transformative results

When building event-driven architectures, one of the challenges we face is coordinating work across many services. How do we implement complex data flows or complex business transactions that consist of multiple asynchronously executed steps? Luckily, there are patterns that can help us manage this complexity: orchestration and choreography. Join us in this fireside chat with Udi Dahan and Laila Bougria as we discuss how each pattern works, the pros and cons of each, and the trade-offs involved when choosing one over the other in specific contexts. See you there!

As systemic complexity increases around us, many technologists are redefining “leadership.” What is technical leadership when good decision-making depends on collective, cross-functional thinking? How is collaborative modeling a form of leadership? What type of leadership does a systems architect provide?

Eb Ikonne, author of “Becoming a Leader in Product Development: An Evidence-Based Guide to the Essentials”, opened our open space event with a keynote. Eb will create the context for our discussions, describing adaptive leadership as something we can practice and a skill we can cultivate. This is the extract of that keynote.

As the relational complexity of software increases, we need, more than ever, smart architecture. Domain-aligned, team-decoupling, cohesiveness-driving, constantly evolving architecture has a massive positive impact. To design systems, we need to evolve the role of “architect” away from the dualistic most-experienced implementor vs ivory tower strategist. 

Architecture is a technology-agnostic skillset. You practice it regardless of which tools or programming language you work with. Architecture practice is a solitary, intra-group, and inter-group activity. We practice it within the human system, when we collaboratively design patterns and relationships, empower decision making and construct cross-functional feedback loops.
In this talk, we explore:

* “What is an architectural decision?” (The answers might surprise you). 
* How do we work effectively individually, intra-team, and inter-team to make them?
* What is the “advice process” and what has it taught us?

Does your team suffer from:

• Inconsistent views of your systems?
• Producing incohesive solutions?
• Ineffective architecture practices and tools?

Introducing Bytesize Architecture Sessions!
Bytesize Sessions are a workshop format that enables collaborative and iterative knowledge sharing.
This talk will enable you to run Bytesize Sessions resulting in the following benefits:

• Improved systems thinking.
• Enriching collaboration within the team.
• Understanding architecture practices and tools in a safe environment.
• A feedback loop controlled by the team produces better documentation across sessions.
• Revealing the Bermuda Triangles!

About Andrea Magnorsky
Andrea is a professional software developer with over 20 years of experience. These days she is a consultant / contractor focusing on strongly typed functional languages and software architecture . Andrea founded Kats Conf, Global GameCraft and many other communities. She also co-founded BatCat Games, a PC and Console game development company in Ireland.

oday most software products are highly networked and distributed solutions used by 1000s if not -10000s of people spread across the globe. To produce an experience that is intuitive and delivers a quality service worldwide, multi-culturally, and 24/7 across all time zones, you need a multi-disciplinary and diverse set of individuals i.e. a tailored team.

Join us in this panel with:
Dawn Ahukanna
Jessica Kerr
Ruth Malan
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
Mathias Verraes
Trond Hjorteland

There is a quote made famous by Ruth Malan from Grady Booch: "Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system." And shaping a system takes time, and seeing the impact of these significant design decisions can take years after the changes have been done. And most of us are usually not there to reak the benefit, or worse, feel its pain. So in collaboration with D-EDGE we will have a panel of people that did experience and will discuss how architecture decisions shaped the system years after the change.