Japanese Architects and Malaysian TechEd

After spending Monday morning exploring Shunjuku, I had meetings and dinner with the local architect evangelists followed Tuesday morning by a meeting with the local evangelism lead. (which was in turn followed by a flight to Kuala Lumpur which is why I’m not posting this until now). In my first year on the job, I focused on the “basics” which included helping improve Architecture Center and handling the TechEd Architecture Track. As part of that focus, I spent little time worrying about globalization issues. Not that they aren’t important, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to handle it. Now that we have worked through the basics, plus it’s now “we” and not just “me”, we can start to have some focus on better globalization support. For example, there’s a Japanese Architecture Center that needs to have the same content as the MSDN site. Machine translation may have come a long way, but there’s still longer to go. Given the massive number of characters in eastern languages, machine translation to English works pretty well – here’s the Japanese Architecture Center in English (translated by Babelfish). However, translating to Japanese (or other eastern languages) is much much more difficult.

Like several other MSFT subsidiaries, Japan has someone responsible for broad reach architecture – i.e. architect with a lower case “a” – so we spent most of our time discussing plans and figuring out how best to leverage each other. I was really impressed how deep these guys were on Software Factories and modeling already – they had a session on Software Factories at the TechEd Japan last week!

Now I’m in Kuala Lumpur for TechEd Malaysia. I’m presenting the Data in SOA talk today and Metropolis tomorrow as part of the Architecture track. I had breakfast with Software Legend Tim Huckaby who I met the first time two years ago at TechEd Malaysia. My teammate Gurpreet just showed me the deck for his Enterprise Architecture talk he’s presenting in about 30 minutes. He’s also doing a presentation tomorrow on Microsoft Architecture Vision & Direction. The EA deck is pretty good and the Vision & Direction talk is something he’s been working on for several months, so I’m looking forward to seeing both of these. We’re working on the next release of The Architecture Strategy Series and I’m thinking these talks should be included.