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Neal Ford

ThoughtWorker / Software Architect / Meme Wrangler

Software Consultant / Speaker / Writer

Neal Ford is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with a focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, articles, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of an increasingly large number of books spanning a variety of subjects and technologies, including the most recent Presentation Patterns. His professional focus includes designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 300 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 2000 presentations. You can email Neal at nford at thoughtworks.com.

The purpose of this site is twofold. First, it is an informational site about my professional life, including appearances, articles, presentations, etc. For this type of information, consult the news page (this page) and the Biography page.

The second purpose for this site is to serve as a forum for the things I enjoy and want to share with the rest of the world. This includes (but is not limited to) reading (Book Club), Triathlon, and Music. This material is highly individualized and all mine!

Please feel free to browse around. I hope you are entertained and enlightened by what you find.

Meme Agora (blog)

January 22, 2013 (Tuesday)

Why Everyone (Eventually) Hates (or Leaves) Maven

Maven is opinionated, rigid, generic, and dogmatic, which is exactly what is needed at the beginning of a project. Before anything exists, it's nice for something to impose a structure, and to make it trivial to add behavior via plug-ins and other pre-built niceties. But over time, the project becomes less generic and more like a real, messy project. Early on, when no one knows enough to have opinions about things like lifecycle, a rigid system is good. Over time, though, project complexity requires developers to spawn opinions, and tools like Maven don't care. more...


May 01, 2011 (Sunday)

Meme Wrangler Origins

A Meme Wrangler -- someone who herds ideas into thoughts, generally through lengthy and complicated discussions (not so much quarrels as "impassioned conversations"). more...


June 09, 2010 (Wednesday)

The iPad - the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I'm convinced that the iPad is the first iteration of the next major computing platform. PC's will become work and power user tools, but everyone will use iPad-like things for many tasks. This is the first incarnation - can you imagine what these things will look like in 5 years? more...


December 22, 2009 (Tuesday)

Why Twitter Matters

Twitter is a meme abiogenesis pool, helping form a karass around a wampeter more effectively. more...


November 04, 2009 (Wednesday)

Productivity Pron

Finding a good system that doesn't get in your way yet allows you to organize all the things going on in your life (both personal and professional) is surprisingly difficult, given the number of tools that purport to do just this. more...


August 05, 2009 (Wednesday)

The Suck/Rock Dichotomy

When a community fades, the fanaticism of the remaining members increases proportionally for every member they lose, until you are left with one person whose veins stick out on their forehead when they try to proselytize people to join their tribe, which rocks, and leave that other tribe, which sucks. more...


July 15, 2009 (Wednesday)

Productivity and Location Awareness

Context sensitivity makes it hard to leverage location awareness. more...


June 10, 2009 (Wednesday)

AML (Arbitrary Modeling Language)

UML is too technical for non-technical people, but not technical enough for technical people. more...


May 01, 2009 (Friday)

Confessions of a Reformed Titilator

Ultimately, using sexually provocative material in a technical presentation is just lazy -- when we do it we're not spending the time to come up with really compelling metaphors to represent something, relying instead on the basest of currency. more...


April 22, 2009 (Wednesday)

SOA and the Tar Pit of Irrelevancy

SOA doesn't have to be a huge scary thing. It's just software, and we aren't going to throw our playbook out the window just because it sounds scary. more...



more memes...

Recent Publications

Presentation Patterns

Techniques for Crafting Better Presentations

You've read about how presentations are like a state of mind, how color wheels work, and what type of isolated high-resolution stock photos to obtain, but how is that helping you with the marketing presentation due next week? This book holds the answers, derived from thousands of hours of presentations by the authors. It is the first book on presentations that categorizes and organizes the building blocks, which we call patterns, required to communicate effectively using presentation tools. If you are a software geek (like us), this will make it clear: we've applied the GoF Design Patterns concept to presentations. We show you how to handle a wide variety of presentation types, audiences, constraints, and even surprises. Unlike other books, we also show you what not to do (anti-patterns), which are just as important as the positive recommendations; modern presentation tools seduce you into doing bad things and we show you how to avoid the traps.

Available at Amazon and other fine book sellers.

ThoughtWorks Anthology Volume 2

More Essays on Software and Technology

Compiled by Neal Ford

Edited by: Michael Swaine

Paperback: 250 pages
Publisher: Pragmatic Press; 1st edition (August 2012)
ISBN: 978-1-93778-500-0

When you hit a rough spot in software development, it's nice to know that someone has been there before. The domain experts at ThoughtWorks share what they've learned in this anthology, bringing together the best field-tested insights in IT and software development. You'll benefit from their experience in areas from testing to information visualization, from object oriented to functional programming, from incremental development to driving innovation in delivery. You'll find yourself referring to this collection of solved problems whenever you need an expert's insight.



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