By Paul Preiss
When I first began shaping the idea that would become Iasa, the very first person I spoke to was Grady Booch. At that time, the vision for a global architecture community was just beginning to take form — a belief that architects needed a shared language, a professional identity, and a place to grow together. Grady’s encouragement and insight helped affirm that this vision mattered, that architecture could and should be recognized as a discipline with both rigor and heart.
Now, more than two decades later, it’s deeply meaningful to welcome Grady back — not as a distant mentor, but as a guest speaker for Iasa itself. Twenty-three years on, our community has grown far beyond what I imagined in that first conversation, and yet the spirit of curiosity, creativity, and professionalism that Grady championed still guides us. His lifelong dedication to advancing software engineering and architectural thinking continues to inspire generations of practitioners.
This event is more than a talk — it’s a full-circle moment. It reminds us that our discipline stands on the shoulders of those who believed in shared knowledge and collaboration long before it was common. I’m profoundly grateful to Grady for being part of Iasa’s story from the very beginning — and for continuing to challenge us to build not only better systems, but a better profession.
This conversation may be the defining moment for architecture itself. As AI stimulates and challenges our assumptions about engineering and craftsmanship it also creates a whole new generation of people considering the toughest architectural challenges, quality attributes, humans and value creation. These combined elements serve as the baseline of what made us architects in the first place. I hope you don’t miss it. I certainly won’t.
Grady’s Talk:
“As programers, we have the privilege and the responsibility of transforming imagination into action. Ours is still a young and evolving craft, and the tools of our practice have changed mightily from the earliest days of computing, a time when software was indistinguishable from hardware, to the present, when software has woven itself into the interstitial space of civilization. Let’s take a journey of exploration for how our discipline has changed and how it will continue to change. Along the way, we’ll expose some of the unchanging fundamentals of the craft.”
https://community.iasaglobal.org/posts/91983253?utm_source=manual