After living under a rock for far too long, I’m excited to introduce Stack Mechanics.

I’ve teamed up with two great friends of mine, Damian Maclennan and Nick Blumhardt to launch a series of deep-dive courses in distributed systems, microservices architectures and continuous delivery.

Don’t panic - I’m not leaving ThoughtWorks :)

The longer version: Damian, Nick and I, alongside numerous other great engineers, have spent a lot of time solving the hard problems that organisations encounter when trying to move away from monolithic, legacy systems. We’ve seen lots of places like the potential that microservices offer with respect to organisational agility and independence, but generally they’ve been completely unprepared for the inherent complexities in such systems and how to manage the trade-offs. Usually we weren’t lucky enough for it to be a green-fields project, and as a result we’ve all inherited our share of legacy, tighly-coupled systems with ugly, scary integrations, unknown black boxes, business logic hidden in integration layers (or ESBs, or stored procedures, or BPM layers), and with the many and various failure modes inherent in such ecosystems.

We arrived at a set of practices, patterns, techniques and tools that helped us solve these kinds of problems and we’ve had a lot of success at it. Unfortunately, we still see so many organisations making the same kinds of mistakes, through the best of intentions, that we first encountered many years ago. Many teams start off well but are unaware of the pitfalls; many have no idea how to even get started.

We’ve decided to get together and offer deep-dive training based on our real-world experiences. We’re kicking off in November 2017 with a three-day, hands-on workshop on .NET architecture, microservices, distributed systems and devops. There will be both theory and practical sessions, covering topics like:

  • Design Patterns for maintainable software
  • Test Driven Development
  • DevOps practices such as monitoring and instrumentation
  • Continuous delivery
  • Configuration patterns
  • REST API implementation
  • Microservices
  • Asynchronous messaging
  • Scaling and caching
  • Legacy system integration and migration

Attendees will work with us and together to build an actual ecosystem to solve a small but real-world problem.

Book your ticket for the November 2017 (Brisbane) workshop now to lock in early-bird pricing.

We’ll be scheduling other workshops in other cities (and probably some more in Brisbane), so register your interest in other dates and cities via stackmechanics.com, follow us on Twitter via @stack_mechanics and on Facebook as Stack Mechanics.