Tudor Teodoru, Centric: Create applications with architectures that allow evolution

The 4th edition of DevExperience gathers great companies and amazing people. One of them is Tudor Teodoru, Software Architect at Centric, one of our Diamond Partners and one of our good old friends. Tudor is also one of the speakers from this edition and he will also have a very interesting community event on the second day of DevExperience, so you would better read this interview and than register for both the conference and the workshop!

DevExperience: Partner at DevExperience for the 4th time in a row. Really thank you for that! Could you please tell us how was the experience with us for you so far and what have you gained in these 4 years of collaboration?

Tudor Teodoru: We chose to partner up with DevExperience even from the start, because we are strong believers in concrete actions that help grow the local IT community.

The conference was back then the only international conference in our region and continues to be the largest of this kind here. This collaboration was a chance to facilitate the connection between our colleagues and international speakers, and also to give back by getting involved in the community workshops.

DevExperience: You are part of Centric only for 3 months and you are already representing Centric as a speaker at DevExperience. How did they welcome you and how was the time spent at Centric in these 3 months?

Tudor Teodoru: My colleagues welcomed me and treated me like part of the team from day 1. When I shared my initiative regarding the talk and workshop at DevExperience, Centric gave me a vote of confidence and I was happy to find the support I needed to put my ideas into practice.

DevExperience: How does it feel to be a local speaker among all these international speakers from all over the world?

Tudor Teodoru: It motivates me to create and deliver a good presentation and I see it as an opportunity to meet them and learn from their experiences.

DevExperience: How do you see the future of IT and how do you see Architecture in 2019?

Tudor Teodoru: The future is hard to predict; all the time, there are technologies that appear and change the way we build software. What I think is important is to be able to keep up with this by creating applications with architectures that allow evolution.

DevExperience: How would you present Centric to someone who would like to work there?

Tudor Teodoru: Centric is a company that offers opportunities both for developers starting their career because there is a very good learning infrastructure in place and also for those more experienced that would like a lot of challenges and multiple possibilities to grow.

DevExperience: What are the technologies used in Centric? Why did you choose those ones?

Tudor Teodoru: Recently we have created our own Technology Radar, and to my surprise it gathers around 300 different items. .NET related technologies and web frameworks (Angular, React) are used by the majority of developers at Centric and we also have people working with augmented reality/virtual reality applications and data science.

DevExperience: What does it take to become a good software architect?

Tudor Teodoru: All architects are in the beginning good technical leaders. As an architect you should balance your technical focus with communication skills, following strategic goals, mentoring and coaching developers. Architects must focus on the value delivered over shiny objects, facilitate communication and ideas, exhibit open mindedness – a willingness to hear everyone out, even if they present contradictory solutions.

DevExperience: Building the architecture for new / legacy projects? Which one is more appealing / challenging?

Tudor Teodoru: I think both are challenging; new projects usually let you explore solutions and use the latest technologies while the business requirements are not so well defined, while legacy systems require more hard work on understanding the business and more time to reach your desired architecture.

DevExperience: How do you manage to inspire the team members to come up with architectural ideas?

Tudor Teodoru: When we are discussing ideas for different architectural problems, I try first to understand what the requirements are and then I encourage the team to come up with solutions. I will often try to find more unusual approaches to keep the discussion open to different possibilities. I am always open to suggestions and I try not to impose a certain solution, instead I believe choices should be made naturally and agreed on by the whole team.

DevExperience: What do you bring new to this edition of DevExperience?

Tudor Teodoru: The talk for this edition is about evolutionary architectures and how we can keep up with changes coming from business stakeholders but also from frequent changes in technology. In my presentation, I will talk about fitness functions, which is a new concept guarding evolutionary architectures. I will show real examples of how fitness functions can keep your architectures from degrading by giving instant feedback.

DevExperience: Tell us a little more about the community event that you are delivering on April 20 at DevExperience! Who should register, why and what will they learn during the workshop?

Tudor Teodoru: The Building Architecture That Deliver in Practice workshop is a continuation of Friday's presentation. It is targeted towards developers/architects that want to introduce/increase use of metrics covering architecture quality attributes in their continuous delivery pipeline.
Together with my colleagues, we will take, for example, a container-based online shopping application and cover different non-functional requirements using tools like SonarQube, NDepend, Azure DevOps, Azure Application Insights.