Software-Defined Culture

GOTO Chicago 2017

Conway's Law tells us "organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." When organizations are healthy and dynamic, adaptability and high-quality software result. Unhealthy organizations “ship the org chart”, producing software that reflects dysfunctional practices. What if we turn Conway's law around and make technology choices that improve our culture? Can bad software choices create new rifts? Are we selecting tech that disempowers developers and keeps operations up at night? Is our software architecture secretly encoding new divisions between our teams? I've run containers in production, written microservices, and operated all manner of infrastructure from established favorites to the latest hipster trends. Let's talk about how all the usual technological suspects (and maybe a few surprising ones) can shape the organizational culture in startups and enterprises alike.