Kata Time

Who wants to put together a team and enter O'Reilly's Architectural Kata competition? If you're not familiar with the idea of architectural katas check out the links below. Basically it's a way to respond to these questions.

How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course.

    -- Fred Brooks

So how are we supposed to get great architects, if they only get the chance  to architect fewer than a half-dozen times in their career?

    -- Ted Neward

Basically you get a one page definition of the problem, access to the "customer" and a short time (typically 2 hours or so) to come up with an architecture and identify the key technologies/components you're going to need to solve the problem. It's a lot of circles, boxes, and arrows on a whiteboard and justification for the choices as well as the potential areas of problem. It's also about being able to present your architecture quickly and clearly to a group of people who haven't been studying the problem and don't have all the context you do.

They're a lot of fun. I've done them a bunch of times and led a few sessions at the various ATG sites and everyone had a great time and learned a lot along the way. If you're interested in doing this let me know in the comments. If your team(s) are interested in doing a session outside the O'Reilly event let me know and we can work something out. It's a good learning/team building exercise any way you slice it.