The challenge

A few weeks ago I was reading this Linked in article by fellow Architect Luca Mezzalira

I’ve read a quite a few bits by Luca through his weekly newsletter “Dear Architects,”, if you haven’t subscribed, give it a go, I happen to like it. Luca has asked his readers as simple question to reflect on. It’s about the field of architecture and how it’s changing. Literally the ask is :“change my mind”. We all know that’s a hard thing to do, but reading between the lines this is more to start a broader conversation. Somehow I liked this challenge and will attempt to reflect, challenge and bring some nuance or insights from my perspective.

The balancing act

Every day we have to deal with balancing opposing values. Recently I have been encountering some of these in what we call “Developer Experience(DX) initiatives”. If I would make an overly simplified statement on what I’d say the mission of DX is about, then it would read something like: :“Developer Experience enables developers to focus on building and shipping cools stuff effectively and efficiently by removing the distractions and friction involved.” That is of course hugely exaggerated but it sets the tone and I’d say this is also echoed in writings on the subject.

AI Agents or “Agentic AI”

Recently, “the age of Agentic AI” was announced to be upon us. The announcement provided a look into the near future. Agents in the form of autonomous actors, leveraging potentially many different conversational AI and LLMs to accomplish common tasks, are here to help us. The perspective is of course driven by the incentives for the large investors in the field of AI development. So let’s take a look on who this is going to help and what providers of actual value adding services can do to get their piece of the pie.

Introduction

I’ve been fortunate to have obtained access to the private previews of Azure resource manager “Deployment stacks” early 2023. Now that the resource manager enhancement is general available it’s appropriate to share some of my initial experience with it. In this blog post I’ll try and explain how deployment stacks will improve working with Azure resource deployments and create a better story for managing the lifecycle of groups of resources.

Taking a walk

End of last Month I took a walk, literally. I’ve walked from the outskirts of Porto to Santiago de Compostela as part of the Camino Portuguese. For me it was a walk of just about 200 kilometers that brings you across the Via Romana XIX (the old Roman road) to Santiago.

The nice thing about walking on average about 25 kilometer a day is that it’s a simple life, that most importantly allows you to clear your mind. The daily routine is like this: “wake up at around 6:00AM, gather your belongings in a backpack, put on sunscreen, check if you’re wearing appropriate attire for the start of the day, check to see if you have enough water, put on your socks and shoes, pick up the backpack and go!”. That’s it, walk until you think you’ve done enough, check-in to an auberge and chill out + repeat. All while enjoying the scenery you pass through and of course have a taste of the local food and drinks, and all the conversations with others on the pilgrimage. A lovely way to break out of the daily office life, I can highly recommend.