Speaker announcement: James Lewis

About James

James Lewis is a programmer and Director at ThoughtWorks based in the UK. He’s proud to have been a part of ThoughtWorks’ journey for seventeen years and of its ongoing mission to deliver technical excellence for its clients and in amplifying positive social change for an equitable future. As a member of the ThoughtWorks Technical Advisory Board, the group that creates the Technology Radar, he contributes to industry adoption of open source and other tools, techniques, platforms, and languages.

James defined the new Microservices architectural style back in 2014 along with Martin Fowler. James’ primary consulting focus these days is on helping organizations align Technology Strategy with their organizational structures to improve their ability to get stuff done.

James is an internationally recognized expert on software architecture and design and its intersection with organizational design and lean product development. As such he’s been a guest editor for IEEE Software, written articles, delivered training, and spoken at more conferences than he can remember.

Get to know James even more at his blog bovon.org or on his LinkedIn page.

The talk: How Flow Works

Have you ever thought about why what we see as the sensible defaults for software engineering in 2024 work? We adopt the key metrics from Accelerate, team structures from Team Topologies, and Microservices in an effort to improve the flow of value to our users (or to a customer saying Thank You, paraphrasing Daniel Terhorst-North).

But what is Value? What is Flow? James will use ideas from Information Theory and Complexity Science to peek into the domain model of our everyday experiences turning ideas into running software. Come along and explore the weird world of how work works. Warning, may cause you to reduce batch sizes because maths.

Why I look forward to this talk

Our next speaker is an old and dear friend of mine, James Lewis. James wrote the seminal paper on microservices together with Martin Fowler. A great piece of work if you ask me.

Since then, microservices have been walking the hype curve. As I see it, it’s not a silver bullet (after all those years, when will we find it?), but it certainly has its situations. Especially if you listen to what James really said and don’t cling to the misunderstandings. :)

But defining microservices is of course just one of many things James has done. His career is full to the brim of interesting experiences, learnings, and results – and he never shies away from sharing!

At myConf James will talk about how flow works and I suspect Goldratt will be in the story somewhere…? What I do know is that I haven't experienced a boring, uninteresting, or uninspiring moment with James ever. This talk will be a blast!

/Jimmy Nilsson, CEO and Consultant at factor10