The day of an architect is filled with technical decisions and tradeoffs. You always need to balance between long-term solutions and right-here-right-now problems.

Many times, you and your team will decide to choose a path that you know might come back to bite you in the future but is good enough for now. The same has happened to me as a CTO of Wilco, where I deliberately chose a fast but fragile solution to one of our early problems. That solution later cost us $10k, a pretty significant to a small startup. But it was definitely worth it!

In this session I’ll share this story. More importantly, I’ll discuss the tools you have as a technical leader to assess the risks, mitigate problems when they show up, and help you get a better understanding of how to balance long-term and short-term solutions.