The Architect’s Master Class
Most architecture training teaches you a framework and leaves you to argue for it on Monday. This one teaches a method for decomposing a system, a way to prove the design before anyone writes code, and the harder part: how to be the person in the room who is trusted with that call.
View course outline
The problem it solves
Everyone knows what a developer does. Almost nobody agrees what an architect does.
Ask ten engineering organisations where the architect’s job ends and the developers’ begins and you will get ten answers, most of them discovered late and expensively. The same fog covers the rest of the role: how much the design should know about the technology underneath it, or about this quarter’s business; what the split of responsibility with the project manager actually is; how you tell a good decomposition from one that will quietly cost you two years.
The class answers those as a discipline rather than as taste: decomposition by volatility, a structure to put the pieces in, and a validation step that runs the design against the use cases before construction starts. Then it does the same for the newest version of the problem: what happens to design integrity, technical debt and cost when much of the code is being written by AI.
Course outline
Nine modules, 49 lessons
The full syllabus, as taught: 82 topics across 38 hours of material. Open a module to see what is inside it.
01The Architect5 topics
- Software development as engineering
- Types of architects
- The role of the architect
- Architects and technology
- Architects and the business
02Microservices Development Process20 topics
- Design granularity effect on the project
- The design and the team
- System and service lifecycle
- Project design
- AI and documentation
- Composable design
- AI and the future of development
- AI and agility
- AI spec-driven development
- Design hand-off point
- Architect and the team
- Developer onboarding
- Career of the architect
- Quality assurance and quality control
- Design for performance
- Service simulation and emulation
- Peer reviews
- Development and design standards
- Metrics collection
- Management visibility
03Introduction to Service-Orientation3 topics
- Why service orientation
- Service-oriented architecture
- Service-oriented applications
04Service Contract Design and Factoring5 topics
- Service contract design
- Contract factoring techniques
- Contract metrics
- Contract factoring process
- Sample project
05Design and Architecture14 topics
- The IDesign Method
- Classic mistakes
- Volatility-based decomposition
- Universal design principles
- The architect’s challenge
- Axes of volatility
- Design example
- Volatility and the business
- Open and closed architecture
- Structure: clients, managers, engines, resource access, utilities
- Design validation
- Containing changes
- Design don’ts
- Design aspects
06Architect in the Age of AI17 topics
- AI code design flaws
- AI technical debt
- AI code design integrity and reuse
- AI code complexity and correctness
- AI code cost
- AI cognitive surrender
- Quality of AI code
- AI code and difficult problems
- AI cost management options
- Architect collaborating with AI
- Reducing complexity by design
- AI taxing senior developers
- How to stay in control with senior developers
- Programming lifecycle
- Hybrid AI / senior developer teams
- Obtaining and grooming senior developers
- What comes next
07Fractal Architecture9 topics
- Software design goals
- Complicated vs. complex
- Complex software systems
- Self-similarity and fractals
- Fractal examples and design patterns
- AI modeling
- Fractal design guidelines
- Simulations
- Fractal and detailed design
08Agile and Design6 topics
- Agile in the wild
- Skills and Agile development
- Design as the key to agility
- Agile as an assembly process
- Agile and lean manufacturing
- Compressing Agile projects
09Groupthink3 topics
- What about Monday
- The pitfall of groupthink
- Architect as agent of change
Instructor
Juval Löwy
Löwy is the founder of IDesign and the author of Righting Software (Addison-Wesley, 2019), which sets out the system and project design ideas this class teaches. He has spent decades architecting systems across hundreds of projects, and took part in Microsoft’s internal strategic design reviews for C# and related products. Microsoft named him a Software Legend.
He has been arguing that services belong at the foundation of software design since long before the industry agreed with him, and he has taught the material to several thousand architects, which is the part that shows. The class is not a book read aloud.
- Founder of IDesign; master software architect
- Author of Righting Software and seven other titles, plus 100+ articles
- Participant in Microsoft’s strategic design reviews for C#
- Recognised by Microsoft as a Software Legend
Questions
Before you book
Why is it the Architect’s Master Class and not the Architecture Master Class?
How is the class structured?
What is the IDesign Method?
Who should take it?
Is there a corporate option?
Corporate plans are available from IDesign. If you would rather talk through what the method means for a system you are already building, talk to us.
Bring the method to a real system
The class gives you the method. If you would like senior architects applying it to your platform, with the decomposition, validation, and the delivery plan that follows, that is the work we do.