Agile development often focuses on immediate concerns: what am I doing now, or, at most, in this sprint? Even in situations where developement is Agile, architecture is often… not.

Ahead of the Pack is an approach to architecture running only one or two steps ahead of development, with the same level of focus: what feature am I describing for the developers right now? Ahead of the Pack means descibing objects—or database tables, or other discrete entities—in terms of their relationship with what has already been developed, so that updates to the architecture do not fundamentally modify what has already been built—or what has already passed quality assurance.

We draw examples from real applications, and provide a glimpse of future directions.

Creating a solid architecture for any system we design can be a challenging process. The frameworks we use often include some opinion about how our software should be designed but these guidelines may not always be the best for the long-term health of our application. How can we build our applications to ensure they are both maintainable and extensible in the future?

In this talk, we'll discuss how taking a feature based approach to our application architecture can help us clearly structure applications that scale well over time. Additionally, we will talk about how we can apply these concepts to both the front-end and back-end to promote a consistent mindset across the entire tech stack. All examples will be using .NET Core and React but the concepts apply well beyond these technologies.

Being a major player in the FinTech space we take protecting our client’s information seriously. Client information must be protected as it flows from system to system but also when it comes to rest (where it is stored long term). Even if those systems aren’t even written in the same technology. Encrypting data presents some very unique challenges like scalability and performance since every system upstream and downstream needs to call the system. It is something that always needs to be on, perform at high scale, and yet still be easy to use and integrate with for other development teams. In this session I’ll walk you through how we built an encryption platform from the ground up, some technologies we used, why we chose them and how developers use the platform using one of our open source frameworks.