Chris Gustafson
All Posts by Chris Gustafson
Identity: A First Class Architectural Citizen?
When I decided to transition away from being a Principal Enterprise Architect into a specialized identity engineering role, a number of my colleagues asked me why. My answer has always been this: Because, for the last five or six years, every project I’ve done has been an identity project—we just didn’t know it when we started. That response is usually met with a nodding head and a resigned, weary shrug. Too often, it fails to...
Whiteboarding for Developers: Yes, You Have To
I’ve always thought developers are a pretty rare collection of individuals. We all vary in our composition; from the quiet introverts to the boisterous extroverts, from button-downed professionals to aloof loose cannons – we run the full spectrum of human personalities. However, we are unique in that we share a set of common traits that are really only understood by us. Our parents might not really know what we do: “He works with computers” Our...
Make It Complicated, So It Can Be Simple
“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” — Albert Einstein “Aren’t we overthinking this?” — almost every developer at some point Like all things that become buzzwords, the Agile methodology has been distorted to represent a number of specious definitions. One definition in particular suggests that Agile removes all complexity from a project. Agile does remove some bureaucracy and “red tape”, freeing teams to produce deliverables faster....