James Lewis
where else to find them
website:https://baldengineer.com
github:baldengineer
bluesky:baldengineer.com
linkedin:james-lewis-microservices
what they talk about
all 14 in the filters
where they keep going back
- GOTO Copenhagen4 editions2014–2025
- NDC Oslo3 editions2017–2022
- GOTO Amsterdam3 editions2015–2024
all 22 in the filters
on a stage with
- Eric Goldsteinonce
- Ian Cooperonce
- Jacob Olcottonce
all 11 in the filters
who talks about the same things
- Sander Hoogendoorn35 talks
- Luca Minudel11 talks
- Daniel Terhorst-North42 talks
- Jakub Nabrdalik20 talks
- Randy Shoup32 talks
- Nick Tune28 talks
| title | conference | date |
|---|---|---|
| Tech Truth: Teaching Kids to Code with Sonic Pi | GOTO Copenhagen 2025 | 2025-09-29 |
Open-source music coding environment claims millions of users and school adoption, uses SuperCollider for synthesis, a Ruby runtime plus C++ MIDI and Ableton… | ||
| The Way the Future Was | GOTO Copenhagen 2025 | 2025-09-29 |
Four short histories run through specific claims and failures: optimistic 20th‑century futures like fully automated luxury space communism fail by distribution… | ||
| The Magic of Small Things – Microservices 10 Years On | Great International Developer Summit 2025 | 2025-04-22 |
A greenfield implementation builds a near real‑time loyalty system that must handle Walmart scale on Black Friday and goes live in an 18‑month Walmart‑scale… | ||
| How Flow Works and other Curiosities | Great International Developer Summit 2025 | 2025-04-22 |
Explains why 42 of 47 days are waiting not working with a concrete value stream example (47 days vs 5 days), uses queuing theory to show congestion collapse… | ||
| How Flow Works and other curiosities | Agile meets Architecture 2025 | 2025-04-03 |
Work arrives and moves as information through value streams, with an example showing 5 days of value work buried under 42 days of wait for a 47‑day lead time… | ||
| SAG Expert Interview #05: The Evolution of Microservices | Software Architecture Gathering 2024 | 2024-11-11 |
Originating as a reaction to monoliths and heavyweight integration, microservices claim to trade big-bang SOA for independently deployable services and team… | ||
| Keynote | Software Architecture Gathering 2024 | 2024-11-11 |
History of microservices traces a 2012 origin story and nine characteristics that push for small, single‑responsibility services deployed from different… | ||
| Early Days of Agile Development & Is Design Dead? | GOTO Copenhagen 2024 | 2024-09-30 |
Recounts the Chrysler payroll rescue where a team pulls a crashed project back to life using extreme programming: relentless testing, continuous integration… | ||
| Panel: Microservices, Where Did It All Go Wrong | GOTO Copenhagen 2024 | 2024-09-30 |
Argues microservices work when chosen for specific needs, not as a default, and shows common failures: rushed boundary decisions during hypergrowth, brittle… | ||
| The Magic of Small Things - 10 Years of Microservices | GOTO Copenhagen 2024 | 2024-09-30 |
Argument: microservices become the dominant style because splitting huge monoliths (five to twenty million lines, clients with 250 million lines of COBOL) into… | ||
| How to Get People Excited about Functional Programming | GOTO Copenhagen 2024 | 2024-09-30 |
Argues functional programming wins when it reduces side effects and makes core logic as testable as math functions, and recommends learning by building: build… | ||
| How Flow Works | GOTO Amsterdam 2024 | 2024-06-10 |
Argues that self‑service clouds plus continuous delivery change flow by turning organizational bottlenecks into queuing problems and uses queuing theory… | ||
| Data-Driven Cyber Policy: From Dream to Reality | RSA Conference 2024 | 2024-05-06 |
Government data collection ramps up with CIRCIA incident reporting and a proposed incident form that asks for MITRE ATT&CK mapping so analysts can track TTPs… | ||
| How Flow Works & Other Curiosities | YOW! Perth 2023 | 2023-09-11 |
Argues that work is information flowing through value streams, models it with agent‑based simulation (NetLogo, a C behavior‑tree prototype, and… | ||
| How Work Works | Copenhagen Developers Festival 2023 | 2023-08-28 |
Argues that self‑service clouds (AWS/Google) behave like an M/M/C queue where C→∞, explaining why they speed delivery, and that many platform teams are just a… | ||
| How Work Works | GOTO Aarhus 2023 | 2023-05-22 |
Ten years of trends condense into a claim: simulate organisations with agent-based models plus LLMs to predict flow and de-risk changes. Examples: Thoughtworks… | ||
| Software Architecture, Team Topologies & Complexity Science | YOW! Melbourne 2022 | 2022-12-08 |
Argues that scaling follows measurable laws: Amazon shows a 1.15 exponent of revenue vs employees (superlinear growth), cities show both superlinear innovation… | ||
| Lean & Lego: Building the Millennium Falcon Redux | NDC Oslo 2022 | 2022-09-26 |
Office engineers turn a 5,000‑piece set and a 300‑page manual into a finished Millennium Falcon by applying measurable lean practices: value stream maps… | ||
| Team Topologies, Software Architecture & Complexity | GOTO Amsterdam 2022 | 2022-06-12 |
Argues that team structure drives architecture and scaling using Team Topologies’ four team types, value‑stream maps and Santa Fe Institute scaling laws; shows… | ||
| Lean & Lego: Building the Millennium Falcon Redux | NDC Porto 2022 | 2022-04-25 |
A group of engineers uses lean product development to assemble a 5,000+ piece Millennium Falcon from a 300‑page manual and proves the techniques speed real… | ||
| Keynote - Software Architecture, Team Topologies and Complexity Science | NDC Porto 2022 | 2022-04-25 |
Research ties microservices, Team Topologies and complexity science to measurable scaling laws: typical companies show sublinear revenue scaling (~0.85) while… | ||
| Software Architecture, Team Topologies & Complexity Science | YOW! 2021 | 2021-11-30 |
Argues organizations must optimize the flow of value and shows concrete practices that do this: Amazon-style forcing functions (teams must use externalized… | ||
| Scale, Flow and Microservices | GOTOpia Chicago 2021 | 2021-04-20 |
Shows that the same scaling laws from biology and cities apply to software organizations: mammal metabolic rate scales with exponent 0.75, typical companies… | ||
| Scale, Flow and Microservices | GOTOpia February 2021 | 2021-02-09 |
Argues that scaling follows measurable power laws: mammal metabolism ~0.75 exponent, company revenue ~0.85 exponent, while Amazon/AWS shows 1.15 superlinear… | ||
| Scale, Microservices and Flow | Build Stuff 2019 | 2019-11-13 |
Argues that universal scaling laws from the Santa Fe Institute explain why hierarchies slow organisms and companies (metabolic-rate exponent 3/4), why listed… | ||
| Panel: Architecture | Øredev 2019 | 2019-11-06 |
Panel argues specific tradeoffs: start with a monolith because it’s easier for small teams and split only when uneven growth forces independent scaling… | ||
| Flow, microservices and scale｜ | Øredev 2019 | 2019-11-06 |
Recent research connects biological scaling laws to software orgs: metabolic rate follows a 3/4 exponent, public companies’ revenue scales ~0.85 per doubling… | ||
| Betting on evolutionary architecture | NDC Sydney 2018 | 2018-09-17 |
A 15-year-old C++ SOA science publisher making $3B a year gets replaced using a walking skeleton and microservice approach; heavy XSLT transforms on AWS S3… | ||
| Betting on Evolutionary Architecture | NDC Oslo 2018 | 2018-06-11 |
Argues that treating architecture as an experimentable asset lets teams place tiny bets and pivot: uses infrastructure as code, CI pipelines, canary and… | ||
| Microservices and the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre | NDC TechTown 2017 | 2017-10-17 |
Argues that shaping teams around business capabilities (not tech silos) produces decoupled, deployable services and faster delivery; cites MIT/HBR and Thomas… | ||
| Microservices and the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre | NDC Oslo 2017 | 2017-06-14 |
Claim: organizational boundaries shape code, so deliberately redesign teams to change architecture. Reorganize into cross‑functional, long‑lived product teams… | ||
| Betting on Performance: A note on Hypothesis-driven Performance Testing | NDC Oslo 2017 | 2017-06-14 |
Project replaces a legacy publishing platform, uses Siege and Vegeta for quick load probes, Graphite and OpenTracing for telemetry, and Ansible for… | ||
| Microservices and the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre | NDC London 2017 | 2017-01-16 |
Claim: software boundaries become team boundaries, so reorganizing teams reshapes architecture. Evidence: studies (Allen, Conway, Dunbar) and a ThoughtWorks… | ||
| Microservices & the Inverse Conway Maneuvre | GOTO Copenhagen 2015 | 2015-10-05 |
Argues that organizing teams as stable, cross‑functional lines of business produces modular microservice architectures by design: examples include a… | ||
| Why code describes business | DevOpsCon Berlin 2015 | 2015-06-29 |
Conway's 1968 paper gives the central claim: organizations that are tightly coupled produce tightly coupled systems, validated later by MIT and HBR studies… | ||
| Building Systems that are #neverdone | GOTO Amsterdam 2015 | 2015-06-18 |
Argues microservices let a system last while individual components are replaced, but they break end-to-end testing and force new practices: prefer lots of unit… | ||
| How I Finally Stopped Worrying & Learnt to Love Conway’s Law | GOTO Chicago 2015 | 2015-05-11 |
Conway’s Law predicts architectures mirror organization, and this is shown with concrete numbers and fixes: a ticketing e‑commerce project with ~200/100… | ||
| Interview with James Lewis | GOTO Copenhagen 2014 | 2014-09-25 |
Microservices are presented as a 40 year old set of complementary practices that coalesce into a pattern language rather than a marketing platform. Key claims… | ||
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