Software Architecture Monday

hello everyone and welcome to software architecture Monday my name is Mark Richards well we've reached a second milestone lesson number 200 as most of you may remember in lesson 100 my first Milestone I I talked about my journey as a software architect and some of the Lessons Learned uh in my career I was trying to think of what could I do for the next Milestone lesson 200 and I thought of a very clever idea and I'm going to call this idea a call to action in this video I'm going to talk about a little bit of the backstory behind software architecture Monday and my videos some of the guiding principles that I formed for these videos and basically well kind of do a call to action for all of you and you'll see what I mean when I get to that point in the video I started my website uh developer to architect.com about s years ago and specifically one of the reasons for this website was not only to provide some resources but also my videos on software architecture Monday and that was almost 7 years ago I never actually thought I would reach lesson 200 let alone lesson 100 but in the course of those seven years I did a little bit of stats uh statistics gathering for this video and uh as of the recording of this video on November 18th 2024 uh it turns out I have 38,000 subscribers which is great 200 videos and also uh 1.5 million views so far um that's a lot of views for these videos and I'm very excited about this um what are the things I wanted to show you uh was the backstory um some of the guiding principles that I formed when I first started software architecture Monday and the first and primary of those was really to have an opportunity building this website to provide giveback to the it Community uh this Journey from being a developer to a software architect is not easy and I wanted to provide some sort of assistance for that but I had a few other guiding principles the first was that this not was not for me a money-making Venture I immediately turned off ads when I had the opportunity to as a matter of fact there was only one video I ever saw an ad appear and it horrified me because that's not the purpose of these videos I don't want you to have have to sit through an ad so I found out how to be able to turn off monetization and I did so I don't do premium channels monetization that was important to me because your time is valuable and I want you to see the content not ads that are appearing through there uh the other thing that was important and critical for me was consistency now I did start out software architecture Monday uh as a weekly video every Monday and hence the name but I quickly found out after about six months uh two things first it took a lot of time to create the videos and I started running out of that time and number two I was fearful that I might run out of content quickly so I switch those to bi-weekly every every two weeks and I've been consistantly doing that for the past 6 and a half years and so that was the other thing that was important to me um but also these videos are not high quality it's just me talking to you and it was important to make sure that I didn't do too much to where I wasn't able to sustain these videos this is simple recording of PowerPoint well in this case keynote slides you could use PowerPoint um but keynote slides recorded on a piece of software called I show you uh instant from shiny white box but this Simplicity was important to me so that I would keep up with this and it wasn't too hard to create these videos and finally it really was important to me to be able to promote knowledge and uh and also learning within the it community and that last part right here is really the purpose of this video a lesson 200 is about a call to action it's about all of you listening to carry this torch forward now I will be continuing with uh software architecture Monday Beyond lesson 200 and so uh this is not my stopping point um however I felt it was a good time to encourage all of you listening to do this same thing now maybe not videos maybe it's blogs and I'm going to show you a lot of examples um but this is essentially a call to action all of you listening have some sort of skill whether it be in software architecture maybe it's microservices maybe it's devops um maybe it's process some of you all of you have a skill and so this call to action is to encourage all of you to do the same thing that I'm doing here if you're receiving value from these lessons other people would receive value from hearing from you as well and I want to show you some different ways that you could actually do this exact thing and the four that I picked I picked on a specific purpose um to illustrate some of the options that all of you listening have available to you right now and the first of those I want to show you is Jackie Reid's website uh Jackie Reid is a friend of mine who wrote the communication patterns book and she maintains a Blog of articles on her website uh for all sorts of interesting aspects including some of her communication patterns and this is a great example of a fairly low cost low barrier of Entry um to be able to just tell everybody about your knowledge a give back back and this is not in video format this is in written format maintaining a website and this is one way all of you listening it can be able to also provide some give back of the knowledge that you have Now The Other Extreme to this is uh a good example is Dave Farley's continuous delivery videos these videos Everyone are amazing I would highly encourage you to look at these where uh Dave has actually been going through most of his videos now through aspects of software architecture so it branches into areas other than the continuous delivery uh kind of theme but Dave's videos are amazing they're very good production quality unlike mine that are hacked together in my office as you can see um but days are very very entertaining lots of movement very high production quality I I bring up days videos because it's another example to look at of the possibilities of what you can do at the higher end very professional end of things however I want to show you another example this is from my friend Carol well Carol is an integration architect expert and he has just as a matter of fact I believe it was next last week uh from the recording of this video just uh established um his YouTube channel Bridging the Gap about integration architecture I love the name of this by the way Carol and Carol's cost of Entry is really low he doesn't have a website what he's going to plan on doing is using Google Slides which has a video capability just like you can see me right here and can record those slides as they're being played and then upload those automatically to YouTube and so this is an example I wanted to show you where um fairly low cost because you do need Google workspace uh to be able to use Google Slides show your video show some animations show an idea and then be able to publish it on a YouTube channel no website even needed well I wanted to show another example that's quite different and that's actually the one that David does here um David through Linkedin um has several newsletters one on software architecture and one on microservices I actually subscribe and follow um both of these newsletters and there are some wonderful fantastic articles uh within here and thank you David uh for doing this kind of give back which is also demonstrating a very low cost of Entry everyone there's no website needed here and there's no videos this is all written newsletters that get to your email that you can read through Linkedin and so this is yet another kind of call to action method to be able to talk to the rest of us teach us about things that you know in this industry so please I hope that you take this call to action idea to heart I can't do this forever and I will be continuing this software architecture Monday but I just thought with this Milestone lesson number 200 that this would be a really good opportunity to encourage all of you to pick up the torch and teach us what you know about architecture about technology about languages whatever it is that you have an expertise in this is important to do all right well that was the Milestone lesson number 200 a call to action and I look forward to all of you listening to do this same thing I have comments open on my videos please if you do already have some sort of means of a Blog a video articles that you're doing um please put those in the comments we would all love to see other examples of this kind of give back to the community so thank you so much for listening stay tuned in two more Mondays for lesson 2011 in software architecture Monday