No Next Next: Fighting Entropy in Your Microservices Architecture

08 April 2022 / Technology / Strategy / Speaking

On Tuesday, I delivered a talk at QCon London: No Next Next: Fighting Entropy in Your Microservices Architecture.

This was my first in person conference talk since 2019, and I really enjoyed it.

I got some great questions after the talk, including questions about:

• how we set up durable teams (you can read more in the blog post Unlocking value with durable teams);
• how we handled teams suddenly having to own a lot of tech they didn’t know about (it takes time, and is still a work in progress; it’s much better if you don’t get into a situation where you have unowned tech in the first place);
• how to sell technical work to the business (Talking like a suit is an excellent article on that topic)
• and how to work on a tech strategy when there isn’t a clear business or product strategy (I think that may be a whole other talk in itself!)

I also got asked a very interesting question about how to improve your storytelling. As I’d mentioned a couple of times in my talk, telling a good story is really important to communication. I didn’t immediately have an answer, but I put it to Twitter.

I got some great suggestions, including:

• read and write a lot
• learn to analyse material, e.g. like you do in a screenwriting course
• improv
• Toastmasters
• think about story types, e.g. the Hero’s journey (This is an interesting post that outlines 8 story types).

Slides from my talk are below. A recorded version of the talk, used in QConPlus, is on the InfoQ site.