Continuous Modernization

As an engineer, it can feel like there is never enough time for testing, designing, or delivering quality solutions. Managers often feel overwhelmed by the need to deliver new features to support their teams while managing vulnerabilities and security standards. Engineers often have to work with legacy systems and learn many new technologies simultaneously to be effective in their jobs. This book teaches you continuous modernization, a key skill for tackling modern and legacy software. By adopting the right mindset and techniques, you will improve systems and workflows, making everything more efficient over time.

Continuous modernization is your essential guide to updating old software systems into modern, efficient, and scalable applications. This book covers everything from changing your mindset and technical practices to business strategies and fostering a culture of innovation. It includes tips on unlearning outdated methods, embracing feedback, making smart decisions, ensuring stability, and applying modern design principles. With practical techniques and real-world examples, it provides the tools you need to modernize your software systems and achieve lasting success successfully.

By the end of this book, readers will master continuous modernization principles and practices. They will learn to spot areas needing improvement, create effective modernization strategies, and implement changes that boost value and efficiency. Additionally, they will understand how to build a culture of innovation and ongoing learning to keep their software systems up-to-date and competitive in a fast-changing tech world.

KEY FEATURES  

• Develop the mindset to drive software success, delivering impactful changes with fewer resources.
• Explore patterns and anti-patterns in technical architecture, team dynamics, troubleshooting, and design.
• Gain insights on solving large-scale software modernization challenges, from culture to architecture.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• Learn patterns, anti-patterns, and tools to improve software architecture decisions.
• Eliminate limiting practices to improve development efficiency.
• Apply disciplined feedback loops to refine architecture and design decisions.
• Implement advanced troubleshooting techniques to prevent design flaws.
• Continuously refactor systems and scale modernization efforts in distributed architectures.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

Our book is for professionals in the field of computer science. It is for software architects, engineers, testers, managers, directors, and VPs. This is for individuals and teams who may or may not have a modernization project but care about improving individuals and systems daily. 

1. What is Continuous Modernization?
2. Unlearning
3. Discipline & Feedback 
4. Decisions & Tradeoffs
5. Stability & Troubleshooting
6. Opportunistic Design
7. Continuous Refactoring
8. The Art of Selling
9. Effective Negotiation
10. Culture Shift
11. Epilogue

Diego, Co-Author

Diego Pacheco is a seasoned, experienced Brazilian software architect, author, speaker, technology mentor, and DevOps practitioner with more than 20+ years of solid experience. I've been building teams and mentoring people for over a decade, teaching soft skills and technology daily. Selling projects, hiring, building solutions, running coding dojos, long retrospectives, weekly 1:1s, design sessions, code reviews, and my favorite debate club: architects community of practices and development groups for more than a decade. Live, breathe, and practice real agile since 2005, coaching teams to help many companies discover better ways to work using Lean, Agile principles, and methods like XP and DTA. I've led complex architecture teams and engineering teams at scale guided by SOA principles, using a variety of open-source languages like Java, Scala, Rust, Go, Python, Groovy, Javascript and Typescript, cloud providers like AWS Cloud and Google GCP, amazing solutions like Akka, ActiveMQ, Netty, Tomcat and Gatling, NoSQL databases like Cassandra, Redis, Elasticache Redis, Ekasticsearch, Opensearch, RabbitMQ, libraries like Spring, Hibernate, and Spring Boot and also the NetflixOSS Stack: Simian Army, RxJava, Karyon, Dynomite, Eureka, and Ribbon. I’ve implemented complex security solutions at scale using AWS KMS, S3, Containers (ECS and EKs), Terraform, and Jenkins. Over a decade of experience as a consultant, coding, designing, and training people at big customers in Brazil, London, Barcelona, India, and the USA(Silicon Valley and Midwest). I have a passion for functional programming and distributed systems, NoSQL Databases, an obsession for Observability, and always learning new programming languages.

Currently working as a principal Software Architect with AWS public cloud, Kubernetes/EKS, performing complex cloud migrations, library migrations, server and persistence migrations, and security at scale with multi-level envelope encryption solutions using KMS and S3. While still hiring, teaching, mentoring, and growing engineers and architects. During my free time, I love playing with my daughter, playing guitar, gaming, coding pocs, and blogging. Active blogger blog at diego-pacheco.blogspot.com.

Sam, Co-Author

Sam has always been passionate about applying engineering to complex business domains. Sam started his career in open-source cryptography before joining an early-stage bioinformatics & data analytics startup with a successful exit to Thomson Reuters. Sam then worked as an engineering leader, leading teams on multimillion-dollar growth initiatives in pharmaceutical research and academic literature analysis. In 2018, Sam switched gears to FinTech by joining a FinTech company in the Bay Area as its Chief Architect, where he now serves as Head of Consumer Engineering, driving its digital banking initiatives.