ITARC 20009 was a great success!

The Atlanta, GA edition of ITARC 2009 was held a couple of weeks ago and, based on the feedback I got from attendees and my own experience, it was a great success. Over 150 architects and people interested in becoming an architect spent two days in a beautiful environment (Thank you, IBM!), with good food, and learning from each other's experiences as well.

But the best thing was the wide variety of talks available, and the quality of the speakers (including Grady Booch via second life) who gave them. As a member of the chapter hosting the conference, and one of the speakers, I may be biased. But, I was able to attend a number of the talks and not only did I learn a good bit, but I found the speakers to interesting, well informed, and worth listening to.

The bottom line is that this year's ITARC was great and that you should make every effort to attend next year's Atlanta ITARC. For those of you not familiar with it, ITARC is short for "IT Architect Regional Conference"; so there may be one coming to your area later this year. I do know there's one scheduled for New York in late September, and you can always check the IASA home page for more information.

For any of you wondering about my talk, I'd say it went very well. The room was set up for 24 people but another eight or nine showed up and wound up standing in the back, so the attendance was excellent. During the talk itself, people looked interested and asked some questions, and the feedback I received from IASA indicted that the attendees enjoyed it and thought it was well done.

Burk In Books: 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

There's a new book available from O'Reilly titled "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts" and though I'm very excited about it, I won't be reviewing it here. Actually, I'd like to post a review, but you probably would not trust it because I'm one of the "experts" who's "wisdom" was collected for the book.

The book is primarily a series of short articles on various topics that software architects deal with in the real world. All of the articles were contributed under the Creative Commons, Attribution 3, license - which means it's essentially an open source book. In fact, the 97 articles in the book are available online for free at the 97 Things web site. O'Reilly also has a preview available on their website so you can see the cover and what the articles look like in the actual book - unfortunately, my articles are toward the end of the book and the preview stops much earlier.

I recommend going to the web site and reading an article or three. If you like it consider buying a copy of the book. I say that not because I get royalties - I don't. Nor did I get paid for the initial writing. I'm suggesting you buy one or more copies because I want the book to succeed so O'Reilly will be encouraged to do more books in the same style; collecting contributions from community members who have something interesting to say and making them available.

The whole process of trying to come up with useful bits of information and explain them in an interesting way - before somebody else beat you to it was fun and challenging and I'd like to do it again. So please go take a look then come back and let me know what you think of it.

{Note to self: Come up with a good sign off line.} <- Yes I meant to leave that there. It's motivational. Burk