On 1/9/2019, in Portland, OR:

Dave Miller-Sr. Software Engineer
Aaron Longwell-
 Director of Engineering, U.S Department of State
Oleg Pashigorev-
CTO, Promomash

addressed the CTO Colloquium in 3 talks:

“Defect-Free Software”
“The Paradox of Evolutionary Architecture”
“Distributed Teams: benefits and drawbacks of running a fully remote international team.”

Summary

On Defect-Free Software: Web application development frameworks like Rails allow you spin up web apps quickly. You can hire fast and cheap, and build fast and cheap. Early stage startups usually prioritize speed over quality. Bugs are OK, you can fix them when they pop up or get reported. What if your startup is building back-end accounting software for banks where correctness is paramount? What changes would you make with your development approach?

On the Paradox of Evolutionary Architecture: Software systems and the teams that build them keep getting more complex. Our old approaches are no longer working. Waterfall, SOAP, Agile and REST are all “dead”. Folks are experimenting with ideas that seem more inspired by chaos than engineering. What gives? Are they right? We’ll explore the Serverless, Microservices, “Pizza” Teams and DevOps movements through the lens of patterns found in the natural world. We will conclude pondering a paradox of modern software: that the more successful systems appear to be less “designed” and less “engineered”.

On Leading Distributed Teams: Very often CEOs will come up with an idea to cut down their development cost 3-4 times by hiring an offshore dev team. In this talk I will share with you what it took to create a successful distributed development team. We will go over benefits and drawbacks as well as restrictions that we had to put in order to work with people from countries that are at WAR. We will also discuss specifics in the hiring process and practices that help us create the culture we all desperately seek and want.

What is the CTO Colloquium?

The CTO Colloquium is a series of meetings held in various cities, at which specialists address Chief Technology Officers in presentations on relevant topics.  Afterwards, they answer questions pertaining to these topics as well as take part in discussions with  smaller groups of attendees.

Who is it for?

The meetings are exclusive to the head of all technology in a company, typically the CTO.  We prefer to keep the meetings small in order to maximize engagement with the presenters and therefor we keep it invite-only.

Please contact us if you’re interested in attending future Colloquiums.

Check out the recap video:

The 2nd CTO Colloquium in Portland from 7CTOs on Vimeo.

Moderators

David Miller

Anup Marwadi
CEO, HyperTrends Global

Oleg Pashigorev