The One with Architecture & Design 2022

Tests are hard to write if the production design is crappy – goes an old saying. Indeed, writing unit tests gives you one of the most comprehensive, yet brutal, feedback about the design of your production code, but if it comes too late, many developers can’t take it and they will either stop testing or test superficially. At the other end, others struggle to write contrieved, fragile tests full of mocks that end up frustrating more than helping them. This talk reviews the main hints that unit tests provide you, from the most obvious improvements to some of the most subtle design principles.

In their latest book, Software Architecture: The Hard Parts, Mark Richards and Neal Ford encourage us to think critically about the trade-offs involved with distributed architectures, as we are always forced to choose among various compromises. In this interview-session, we sit down with Mark and Neal to discuss about the hard parts in software development and various challenges we face in the role of architect.

Azure Data Explorer (ADX) is a service designed to analyze massive amounts of structured and semi-structured data in near real-time.
In this session, I will show you when, where, and how to use ADX and how to use the Kusto Query Language to create powerful, fast queries to analyze your data.

Greenfield software development is something we often wish for but rarely experience. Successful systems persist and we have to work in them years and decades beyond their inception. Many times the original developers are gone or unreachable, yet we have to make changes. In his talk, Michael Feathers will describe ways of approaching unfamiliar code and changing it safely that can be put into practice immediately to decrease hazard and make change easy.