Architecture

A friend of mine has a Far Side desk calendar that he describes as a barometer for how busy he is. Some days he finds himself tearing off a whole bunch of pages because he’s been too busy or distracted to tear one off each day.

Earlier this year I wrote an article to introduce service-oriented architecture to non-technical people. It was published in the May 2007 issue of Better Software magazine.

The kind folks at Better Software have allowed me to provide a PDF version of the article, complete with retro 1950s graphics. You can also read it as a single html page.

Please post any comments here, because I’ve disabled comments on the page itself.

It turns out that having a day job can play havoc with your blogging activities. I’m posting a round-up of recent activities, in no particular order, with the intention of expanding on each of these topics in the coming weeks. But we all know what happens to intentions.

This is mostly a brain dump to make me feel guilty enough to write some of it up, so feel free to skip it if you’re busy. That FaceBook page isn’t going to update itself you know.

I’ve got a number of tutorials, conference sessions and keynotes coming up over the next few months that I’m very excited about. My themes for this year are behaviour-driven development, SOA for human beings and understanding what simplicity really means. Looking at these, there is an overarching theme about getting different kinds of people talking to each other in plain English (for some value of English).

Keynote at QCon, 14-16 March, London ¶

QCon is the London version of the excellent JAOO conference in Denmark, which has become my favourite technology event of the year (apart from phone upgrade time). They attract world-class presenters to provide sessions varying from the deep technical through to people and process topics, and they’ve done the same with QCon. What’s more, they have managed to resist the lure of the sales-pitch session, which means you get to hang out with other geeks without people trying to sell you stuff. The London event is being run in conjunction with the common-sense guys at InfoQ, and I’m lucky enough to be speaking there.

I was lucky enough to attend the Software Architecture Workshop in Cortina recently. It was a three day workshop based around the idea of Open Spaces, which involves handing the asylum keys to the inmates and seeing what happens.

I convened a session called “What’s so hard about Event-Driven Programming?” to explore the experiences of the other delegates in designing, implementing and testing asynchronous, event- or message-driven systems. I took the position that actually it was all very straightforward as long as you followed a few basic principles. Another delegate, Mats Helander, took the opposing view that asynchronous, event-based systems could develop scary emergent behaviour that would lead to a world of hurt.