Designing for Consumption

Earlier this year, I was a guest speaker at O'Reilly's Software Architecture Conference in New York where I spoke about Designing for Consumption. I discussed how modern web and mobile applications have read/write ratios that are far different than when many of the underlying technologies and architectural patterns were first developed. Because the foundation for data design is rooted in pre-web, many web service architectural patterns are still based on those antiquated ideas and can establish serious limitations to modern web and mobile applications. As architects, I believe we need to examine our underlying assumptions to determine if those assumptions are still applicable to the systems we’re designing today. My goal at this conference was to present a mental framework that informs the appropriate technology decisions and architectural patterns that best suit our current drive for world-class, consumer-facing solutions.