Are architects supposed to be the smartest people on the team, making all the important decisions for developers to fill in the blanks? Certainly not. Rather, architects make everyone else smarter, for example by sharing decision models or revealing blind spots. Architects also communicate across many organizational layers by using models and metaphors. This talk reflects on two decades working as an architect, ranging from the executive penthouse to the serverless engine room.
Speaker
![](https://qconsf.com/sites/qcon_sf/files/styles/medium/public/pictures/2024-07/gregor.png?itok=3Cn-9tij)
Gregor Hohpe
Director of Enterprise Strategy @Amazon, Previously @Google and @Allianz SE, Author of "The Software Architect Elevator" and Co-Author of "Enterprise Integration Patterns", Active Member of the IEEE Software Advisory Board
As Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS, Gregor helps technology leaders transform both their organization and their technology platform. You’ll find him riding the Architect Elevator from the engine room to the penthouse, perhaps automating serverless solutions in the morning and preparing board presentations in the afternoon. His favorite pastime is dissecting buzzwords and replacing them with meaningful decisions and architectural trade-offs.
Before joining AWS, Gregor has served as Smart Nation Fellow to the Singapore government, as Technical Director in Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO, and as Chief Architect at Allianz SE, where he oversaw the architecture of a global data center consolidation and deployed the first private cloud software delivery platform.
Gregor is known as co-author of the seminal book Enterprise Integration Patterns, which provided the reference vocabulary for all modern ESBs. His book The Software Architect Elevator tells stories from the trenches of IT transformation while his articles have been featured in Best Software Writing by Joel Spolsky and 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know. He is an active member of the IEEE Software advisory board.