Gomel Architectural Community

In recent years, the demand for specialists in the field of systems design and design has grown significantly. Which is not surprising, because applications and systems are becoming more complex every year. The size of the team and teams participating in one project is growing. The business (customer) wants inexpensive solutions and quickly. Everyone has to deal with this Software Architect (Solution Architect or abbreviated SA). Although our industry is young, it has already accumulated many ready-made solutions, ranging from libraries and frameworks to approaches, practices and patterns.

On each project, we make a large number of decisions, the correctness of which determines the success of the project. All of these questions are answered by Solution Architect.

Java or .Net or Python or maybe PHP? React or Angular (first or second)? Take a finished library / framework or write your own? What library / framework to choose for your needs? REST or SOAP? RDBMS or NoSQL? And if NoSQL, then which one? How to provide the necessary load? Will the solution scale? How to make it a team of 50 people in a year? How will we integrate with a third-party system? And if it is unstable, then how will we provide the characteristics we need?

There are hundreds of questions and answers. Some critical to the project, some less important. But one thing is clear: in the modern world it is very difficult to make decisions based only on your own experience. To fill the gaps in knowledge, we study, read books, blogs, attend conferences, study ready-made solutions,we communicate with colleagues, acquaintances, like-minded people, share experience.

Gomel Architectural Community

The most difficult thing is most often to understand what to teach, read, which conferences are useful. Where to find colleagues and like-minded people with whom it will be possible to effectively share experience?

People who know me personally remember how 3 years ago I was looking for myself, looking for like-minded people, looking for a way to remain a technical specialist and not become another manager (although, as an architect, the experience of team leader and manager was very useful to me). I searched, I searched for a long time, but in the end I found my way. Way to Architecture.

Now I want to simplify the search for people like me who have outgrown the developer and want more. But, like me, he wants to continue to code, study technology, be on the cutting edge of technology. To do this, I create an Architectural Community that will help you understand: what is architecture. During community meetings, we will share our own experiences and tell you who the Architect is and how to become one. I learned a lot and learned a lot over the years of my career. I want to share all this with you during meetings and communication via the Internet.

How i see it

I must say right away that I have no experience in organizing such communities outside the company. I rely on the experience of other people, my own feelings (what I would like to see) and the Team of like-minded people , which helps me organize all this. We will be, as they say, Agile. So expect experiments, gathering feedback, new experiments and again polls ... The

Community, these are primarily people, like-minded people . Therefore, the first task is to gather such people and introduce them to each other. To solve it, social networks are ideal. Therefore, a group was created on Facebook .

Secondly, this is a common goal. The aim of the Architectural Community is to share knowledge and experience, grow and become more successful. To do this, in the group / stream we will share thoughts, experiences, advise good books and articles, ask questions that interest us.

Well, the third. In order not to lose touch at all, we will periodically meet live . As practice shows, the Internet is the Internet, but it is much easier to communicate when you have met a person in person. We plan to meet once every 2-3 months.

First Community Meeting

The first meeting will be held in late November, in an informal setting, in the evening after work, in one of Gomel's anti-cafes / anti-cinemas. We do not want a large audience, this is not a conference. It is rather an interest club. There will be 30 people. I will personally invite.

The duration of the meeting will be 3 hours. Topics and speakers for the first meeting have already been selected. There will be 3 reports in total, 45 on the topic and 15 minutes for questions and comments. I will tell you in detail about the topics of the reports in a separate post (the current one has already swollen incredibly, IMHO).

If you want to participate, then write to me: andrei.kavaleu@gmail.com. Be sure to tell yourself: who you are, what you do and how you relate to architecture.

Architects of all countries Unite!

In general, if you are interested in Architecture, if you want to find like-minded people and start communication on topics that interest you, if you want to share your knowledge, learn something new, just have a good time ...
If you know how to answer questions at the beginning of the article - come to us, if you don’t know, then come all the more.

Let's unite the Architects of Gomel! And not only Gomel.

What can you do now? Come into the group of our community , follow the news, ask questions, find out about the upcoming events. Email me about your desire to participate in the Community.

Survey: community site

I have one unresolved question: what site to choose for the community?

Requirements :

• the ability to communicate, share experiences, announce events;
• easy access to the community for both participants and those just interested;
• ease of maintenance, so that my team and I can concentrate on the community itself and not waste time on administration.

Social networks are ideal for the first and last requirements. On the other hand, Facebook and LinkedIn require registration in order to view content (for example, I did not have a Facebook account until this week, and the restrictions on the length of the message on LinkedIn are depressing). Own site / site does not fit the last criterion.

In general, I hope for your help in choosing a site. Interested in the opinion of everyone, and not just Gomelchan. (Facebook is a workaround)