Wow. Seems like I have lots of catching up to do as far as motion on the architect community.
In February, the International Association of Software Architects stood up a
Denver chapter, with Paul Rayner as president. In a nutshell, IASA wants to be for software what the AMA is to medicine. They've got some great ideas, and some big challenges ahead -- but that's the topic of another post.
Four of us from the Fort Collins area (
Kathleen Dollard, Mark Sigda, Peggy Collins and myself) attended the inaugural event, and several more. We kept talking about trying to do some networking closer to home.
A couple months ago, we finally started to do something about it. Douglas Gennetten and Eric Liprandi joined the previously named suspects to plan it out.
We've ended up with a plan to meet twice a month. The first Wednesday of every month, we're meeting for a networking lunch. the third Wednesday evening of every month, we're meeting for a technical session (hosted at
Colorado CustomWare).
Our goal is to keep the discussion at a high level. We're doing this for a few reasons. The first is that the problems we're discussing are bigger than any one technology. the second is that we're hoping for synergy between several groups of people: Java-centric architects, .NET-centric architects, and those architects who don't code at all. (For that matter, Java and .NET are only examples; we're not picky about what language you use!)
We held the first technical meeting in September. Kathleen presented some very interesting work she's been doing around using interfaces to increase application longevity. We had 13 people there, some from Boulder and Denver. And, in typical fashion, the discussion ranged far afield.
This month, we began a series on SOA. The intent was to start with the basics, but in a room with Kathleen, Doug Gregory, and Fernando Cardenas... let's just say the conversation didn't stay basic very long. The discussion was terrific, with deep implications for how applications will be architected in the future. In particular, SaaS and the implications for business models led to a rather spirited conversation.
I know Doug, Kathleen and Fernando are planning on blogging the more technical aspects of the conversation.
For anyone interested in joining the group, just hit our
Google group to see what we're up to...
(edit: links have been fixed)