ALL SPEAKERS
AT A GLANCE
Role
Software Architect, Author, Instructor
Organisation
Independent
Category
Hero
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Neal is an independent software consultant, best-selling author, and international speaker. 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, nine 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 engineering, and includes a business-focused book and video on improving technical presentations. He is an innovator in building concrete verification mechanisms for software architecture, for humans or agents. Check out his web site at nealford.com.
TALK
How To Teach Your Agents About Architecture
Emphemerality: the concept of things being transitory, fleeting, or existing only for a short time. Suddenly, one of the most important considerations for code is ephemerality–how long will this code live? If it's a quick vibe-coded solution then no one cares about good architecture. However…if what you're building is the foundation for future building, you need ways to ensure that agents (either humans or machines) build proper software. How To Teach Your Agents About Architecture represents several years thinking about how to concretely define nine different intersections of software architecture with how humans and agents build software. This class shows developers and architects how to define architecture rules embedded within specifications and how to use the same rules to generate deterministic guardrails. Even with the best models, developers should trust but verify. How To Teach Your Agents About Architecture provides techniques to both teach your agents about architecture and govern non-ephemeral code. We define architecture in code in the following nine intersections: • GenAI • Implementation • Infrastructure • Engineering • Data • Integration architecture • Team topologies • Enterprise Architecture • Business For each of these, we provide examples of how developers and architects can build rules that provide fast feedback when important things happen. For example, this framework allows developers to define rules that prevent developers (or agents) from "cheating" in a mono-repo source code repository. Similarly, when architects need to break a database apart for scalability, we show techniques to restore data consistency and referential integrity.
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