Last week I made an announcement on LinkedIn that I am re-launching the Stack Mechanics brand and offering training on software architecture, microservices, and other software engineering topics.

I want to talk about some of the background of this, and why I think it’s an important thing for me to do.

Getting to the launch was quite a journey. I did the first Stack Mechanics workshop in late 2017 with my good friends Andrew Harcourt and Nicholas Blumhardt and we never intended it to be a one off thing.

However between various startups, job changes, life changes, and pandemics, it didn’t happen again. At the beginning of each year since the first one I’ve made plans to do training, and each year the life would throw a curve ball.

At the beginning of 2022 I kicked off the planning around putting together a subscription video course with this content, but after a few months of writing course outlines and content plans, I realised my heart just wasn’t in recording, editing, and producing hours and hours of video content. Not just yet anyway.

With the world “opening up”, and people having an appetite to get out to more events, running workshop training seems like a feasible thing to do again.

So why do it, why now?

In my consulting career I’ve spent a lot of time on the clean up end of projects. Helping pick up the pieces after the time and money has been spent and trying to bring a working system on line is interesting work, but it never ceases to amaze me how often the same problems come up.

Our industry is in an interesting place, it’s very hype driven, so developers want to get new tech and tools under their belt and on their resume. We’re also in a period of tremendous growth with a talent shortage. The result of these two things is that people are being promoted quickly, and into decision making positions without the experience to see pitfalls.

The other thing I see a lot of is the companies who see the carnage created by others, and are essentially paralysed from the fear of not wanting to make mistakes to end up the same. As a result they’re not advancing their own platforms and end up on frameworks that are hitting an end of life status.

How Stack Mechanics can help

With Stack Mechanics I hope to be able to address both these challenges.

I aim to be able to make “getting started” easy by teaching some of my “from the trenches” experience to bootstrapping new architecture with developer and operations effectiveness in mind. On the flip side, by teaching design and modelling strategies and patterns I can help teams falling for the common mistakes out there and help them build more effective solutions in an agile way.

Talk to me

I would love you to check out the courses and see if they’re a good fit for your team. I plan on bringing these to more locations, so if you’d like to know when I’ll be in your city, please get in touch. If there’s support, I’ll definitely book something.

I’m also offering this training in private for companies with larger teams. I can come to you, and we can look at tailoring some of the content towards your specific challenges.

I’d also love to hear from people if there’s content or a topic that you see a need for.

In general, I’d love to talk to more people about any gaps you see and how we can all help the industry with better training. My email is damian@stackmechanics.com.