Modern software development exhibits a curious trend: Yesterday’s Best Practice Becomes Tomorrow’s Antipattern. Why? EJB and SOA were once Best Practices, now shunned as anti-patterns. This keynote investigates why this trend continues, including increased tech stack complexity, primordial abstraction ooze, code reuse abuse, strangling dependency management, and the fundamental dynamic equilibrium of the software development ecosystem. I also investigate How to Avoid Yesterday’s Best Practice from Becoming Tomorrow’s Antipattern, including domain centric architectures, immutabile infrastructure, evolutionary architecture, incremental architectural change, and how to favor evolvability over predictability. Also includes figurative and literal dumpster fires.
Neal is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler
at ThoughtWorks, a software company and a community of
passionate, purpose-led individuals, who thinks disruptively to
deliver technology to address the toughest challenges, all while
seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social
change. He is an internationally recognized expert on software
development and delivery, especially in the intersection of agile
engineering techniques and software architecture. Neal has authored
magazine articles, seven books (and counting), dozens of video
presentations, and spoken at hundreds of developers conferences
worldwide. His topics include software architecture, continuous
delivery, functional programming, cutting edge software innovations, and includes a business-focused book and video on improving technical presentations. Check out his web site at nealford.com.
