Join us in Trottier Building Room 2100 at McGill University for an insightful session that challenges conventional wisdom in architecture design. Donald Donovan will explore how real-world constraints often push us away from textbook solutions toward more pragmatic approaches that better serve business needs.
Agenda:
18:00 : Welcoming participants & Networking
18:30 : Introduction
18:35 : The Least Worst Architecture: Main Presentation
19:45 : Quizz and Survey
20:00 : Closing
This talk is about making architectural decisions in the real world, with real business constraints, and tries to show why the unintuitive "ideal" technical best case and textbook "best practices" are not always providing the best outcomes. Sometimes the architecture that best fits the business isn't the most resilient, the most scalable, the most cost effective, the most maintainable, etc. Architecture is about trade-offs and avoiding absolutes. Even basic security is a negotiable instrument in some scenarios, with trade-offs to be made. Our job isn't to define the requirements, but instead to report on the risks, mitigations, costs, timelines, gaps, and potential solutions, and then let the business decide which tradeoffs to accept. The final choice isn't the technical team's to make, it's the business's, as they're ultimately the responsible party for any outcomes, good or bad.
In this talk we'll walk through some example architectures, where they failed, what they could have done better, types of questions we might ask that drastically influence the architecture(s), and show what a final solution might look like. Some of these examples are intentionally strange or unintuitive, because sometimes, the least-worst option is the most effective, but not always the most obvious.
What You'll Learn:
- Why "ideal" technical solutions sometimes fail in practice
- How to evaluate architectural trade-offs beyond technical metrics
- Techniques for communicating risks and options to business stakeholders
- Real-world case studies of successful "least worst" architectures
- Frameworks for making balanced architectural decisions
Who Should Attend:
- Software architects and technical leads
- Engineering managers
- DevOps professionals
- Technical decision-makers
- Anyone involved in designing or implementing technical solutions
