Category: Software Development
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Fall Speaking Schedule
I have two talks coming up in the Fall, they both will be at excellent conferences so I hope to see you there: October 16, 2017 O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in London. I’ll be giving a talk on Platform architecture in the retail space. Having worked in retail for the past seven years, the number…
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What Architects Do? – Part 2
Governance or Strategy I’ve fielded many questions lately on how I am governing and reviewing the architectures of Target to make sure they conform to enterprise standards. This is a common question asked of Architecture teams. After all, many people believe the main responsibility of Enterprise Architecture is governance. But governance is the last thing…
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What Do Architects Do? – Part 1
Having been Chief Architect for Best Buy and currently Chief Architect for Target, I get this question frequently. The question occasionally comes at your neighborhood party but generally it’s from people in Engineering or Marketing. At the neighborhood party you attempt to answer this question at risk of becoming known as the “boring tech guy.”…
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Open Source North Rides Again
We had another fun and exciting rendition of Open Source North in June earlier this year (2016). It’s a conference that eventually will be recognized as the premier technology event of the year in the Twin Cities. Well, that’s my prediction at least. I had a great time and got to give my presentation/group discussion…
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Tech Cities 2016 – The Agile Architecture Game
Coming up in February 2016 I’ll be facilitating the Agile Architecture game with my former colleague and game inventor Kevin Matheny. We’ve used the Agile Architecture game within BestBuy.com to help project managers, business analysts, product managers, engineers, and others learn about the tradeoffs involved with long term software architecture choices. It’s a fast way…
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Revolutionary’s Revenge
Sometimes I think I studied the wrong field in college, I should have been a political scientist or a historian. Having studied in those fields it may have helped me understand that the worst thing that can happen to a revolutionary is to win the war and end up governing. A true revolutionary is not…
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Internal Open Source Projects
What does it mean to start an open source project internal to an organization? Does that make any sense? Many large organizations have very large systems within them, systems which are mission critical to the delivery of their business model. These systems are often bottlenecks for development as, in some fashion, they cannot be avoided…
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I’m In the Library!
This may be a bit self-promotional (but then it is a blog) but I made it into the library! Wow, you say. Well let’s step back to childhood and growing up in an academic family where the measure of worth was not just how many Bachelors degrees a person had, that was small potatoes, but…
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The Art of Large Systems
I was discussing art with my daughter, someone who is extremely talented at what most people consider art. That is, being able to draw and paint things that look amazing and you know you could never do yourself, not in a million years. In any case, she made the comment that all artists hate their…
Platform Centric 