READING NOTE · UPDATED 2026
Separate the event report from current architecture decisions
The Australian Architecture Forum reference belongs to 2008. Architecture tools and platforms have evolved, while coordination, reversibility and delivery constraints remain useful questions. Treat the event report as a record of the discussion then. For a present decision, document the options, the evidence available and the conditions under which you would revisit the choice.
A practical next step
- Retain the event date when citing the report.
- Describe a current architecture decision and its constraints.
- Choose a small experiment that reduces the most important uncertainty.
This 2026 reading note is written by the Durnall editorial team. Richard Durnall’s original text follows below.
Historical references checked in 2026
The original words remain below. References without a verified useful destination are plain text rather than links to an error or unrelated website.
- Australian Architecture Forum: The historical hostname no longer resolves.
Original publication: .
Original WordPress feed timestamp, UTC; the old theme’s local date may differ. Check the date source ↗
The original words below retain their period and attribution. The reading note above is the current editorial addition.
Source capture · 2009-01-29 ↗It’s usually viewed as customary to let folk know about a presentation in advance. Unfortunately I’ve been so busy over the last few weeks that I’m only just getting a chance to write about this years Australian Architecture Forum (AAF) now….
Last Friday was the AAF in Melbourne, where ThoughtWorks were a gold sponsor. Last year I presented on analysis techniques for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), which went down pretty well (for a post technical guy at a conference full of enterprise architects anyway). This year I got invited back to present the locknote presentation with my regular sparing partner, Josh Graham.
The locknote presentation was on middleware and specifically how it’s grown out of all proportion, making even the simplest task slow and expensive. We stole it straight from the presentation that Jim Webber and Martin Fowler used for the keynote at Qcon, except that we removed all of the terms that caused offense to the crowd at Qcon! Webber is doing the presentation today in Sydney with Josh so I’m sure the ThoughtWorks complaints hotline will be ringing off the hook for the rest of the week.
I’m doing quite a bit of presenting at the moment and I’m looking for a way to make the slides available in a sensible way, either through this site or one of the cool slide sharing sites that are popping up around the place. If you’re using anything that you think is particularly good for sharing slides (sideshare etc.) then let me know…