We had our first meetup of the year (and decade) last January 30th!
We had a special guest who facilitated the meetup for the night, Patrick Baumgartner. He’s a fellow Craftsman hailing all the way from Switzerland, and is one of the organizers of their local meetup, Software Crafters Zurich.
Patrick’s love for learning from and with others brought him to share with the group about Architectural Katas. As with coding katas, the exercise is a form of practice to get better at architecting software systems. Architecture is an area software engineers can always find room to improve at, but rarely have an opportunity to practice in our day to day. How often do you get a chance to architect a fresh system?
After a few bites to eat, we started at 7 pm with an introduction to Architecture and the evening’s activities.
We then broke out into groups, and each group was given a problem to solve.
Groups then tried to come up with a solution and map or diagram it out in their whiteboards.
Patrick played the product owner giving clarifications where needed.
This was just the first round. At the end of 20 minutes, groups moved to other groups’ boards to give feedback on the diagrams other groups have come up with.
After this, Patrick introduced us to the C4 model, a way to efficiently and effectively communicate software architecture at different levels of detail. More details at the C4 model website if you want to learn more: https://c4model.com/.
Armed with a new tool and feedback we’ve received, the groups were ready to revisit their work in the second round.
At the end of the round it was feedback time again! This time though, we were given a checklist of items we found or didn’t find in the diagram we saw from other groups. At the end of the review, the whole group signed their names to the checklist.
After a brief review of the feedback we’ve given and received, we were then ready to go into the last round. This last round came with a twist. Add two outlandish requirements to the architecture you have to build! We came up with some crazy suggestions like:
- 1 billion users
- Toddler-friendly
- IE6 support!
With that, the groups revisited or refined their work from the past round.
And here’s one of diagrams one of the groups ended up with after the final round.
We concluded with a question of what we can take from this that we can bring to work the next day, and then of course, a group photo at the end.
Huge thanks to Patrick again for sharing this with us.
And thanks to PageUp People for sponsoring the place and food.
If you are interested in Software Engineering and Software Craftsmanship and would like to join us in Manila, we’re hosting our monthly meetup usually at the 3rd week of every month.
Check us out online at:
- Our website (where you’re reading this): https://softwarecrafters.ph
- FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/softwarecraftersph
- FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/softwarecraftersmanila/
- Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Software-Crafters-Manila