16 years ago, my teammates and I built software for big internet properties. We spun up a single instance of open-source software, then added a lot of custom code. Now, we build information systems – data platforms, decoupled frontends, event streams, lots of interdependent software and services with many types of consumers.

In the world of “digital transformation”, software is becoming systems. Unfortunately, we don’t think in systems.

Systems are nonlinear. They reorganize our mental models and communication structures. Yes, we need to learn cloud-native architectures, Kafka, Kubernetes, GoLang, Terraforming, etc. But we also need to transform how we think together, or we will build the same old things with fancy new tools.

In this talk, we’ll explore essential nonlinear skills and practices for IT professionals, including some we might not think of as “IT” skills. Practices that help us navigate from software to system