Neal Ford
Internationally recognized software architect, best-selling author, and speaker at hundreds of technical conferences.
Software Architect
Neal is an internationally recognized expert on software development, engineering, and architecture. He was a professional services consultant for an international consultancy for more than 20 years, eventually inaugurating their distinguished engineer role. One of the advantages of many years as a consultant lies with seeing many different problems and (attempted) solutions, gaining tremendous breath of knowledge.
Neal has worked on software in the following domains, non-exhaustive:
Neal is interested in all types of interesting software architecture problems.
Author
Neal has written a number of books, mostly on deep technology subjects. It started with programming language focused books, then a few books about advice, a programmer productivity and business-focused presentation techniques book until settling into numerous books about software architecture.
They are listed here in reverse chronological order:
Neal enjoys writing and finds that writing about something it the best way to understand it deeply. Interestingly enough, revisiting technical material more than once (the second editions) is surprisingly illuminating.
Speaking/Teaching
Neal has been speaking at technical conferences since the Borland International conference, Nashville 1997, and has been regularly speaking at software conferences up until the present day.
Speaking
Some highlights:
Training
I also offer onsite training for material derived from my books. All classes are two days in duration and include numerous hands-on group-based exercises.
Podcast Host
Neal created two popular podcasts.
Software Architecture Book Club Podcast
Neal is creator and one of the current host of the Software Architecture Book Club podcast
This podcast goes chapter-by-chapter through books about software architecture, by the authors of those books, starting with Head First Software Architecture.
It started as an interactive web session that Mark Richards and I created for our first book, Software Architecture Fundamentals, recorded monthly in front of a remote audience, to answer questions about each chapter of the book. At some point, we decided to record the sessions, which kicked off this podcast.
In it's current incarnation, we took Head First Software Architecture and went through each chapter, describing the writing process, why some topics were included at the expense of others, and general observations about the topic. After completing Head First Software Architecture, we moved to the Software Architecture Fundamentals 2nd Edition.
We're using the podcast medium in a slightly different way than most. Instead of focusing on ephemeral news items, we base our episodes on chapters of our books, making it a permanent resource for anyone who picks the book up and would like to follow along with past episodes.
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
Neal was one of the creators and original hosts of the popular Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, and shepherded the podcast with two episodes a month for over six years without missing a publication date.
This podcast focused on any topic that one of the six hosts found interesting from a technology standpoint, including new technologies or approaches to problems, interviews with co-workers with unique approaches to a problem, background on each edition of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar, and a wide variety of other topics.
Upcoming Appearances
Meme Agora (blog)
September 08, 2015 (Tuesday)
Knowledge Breadth versus Depth
As an architect, value technical breadth so that you have a larger quiver from which to draw arrows. If you are transitioning from developer to architect, realize that you may have to change the way you view knowledge acquisition. more...
September 02, 2015 (Wednesday)
Simple, Repetitive Tasks
Computers are designed to do simple repetitive tasks. As soon as you have humans doing repetitive tasks on behalf of computers, they all get together late at night and laugh at you. more...
July 20, 2015 (Monday)
Ambient Information
Any friction between information and its access represents a cost of that information. Apple Watch drives the cost of the information you want to see to virtually zero. more...
March 30, 2015 (Monday)
Architecture is abstract until operationalized.
Microservice architecture is the first post-DevOps revolution architecture, highlighting the realization that architecture and DevOps must mesh, making operational concerns a first-class citizen in architectural design. more...
October 16, 2013 (Wednesday)
How Bad Presentations Lead Us to Create Presentation Patterns
Applying patterns to presentations was a stretch, another in a long string of potentially specious relationships between things that pop into my head from time to time. Yet, I couldn't give this idea up. Despite myself, I continued to identify patterns (and anti-patterns) in my own talks and others. I thought about writing it down, but at the time, the concept was still restricted to technical presentations, and I realized the audience for such a book would be entertaining to many of my presenter friends, but to not many other people. But then I realized that all professionals must do presentations at one time or another. more...
May 28, 2013 (Tuesday)
Build Your Own Technology Radar
Creating a technology radar for yourself helps you formalize your thinking. . .You should treat your technology portfolio like a financial portfolio (in many ways, they are the same thing). . .Most C-level types get more advice from sales men than people in their own company. . . While this is a wild fantasy, wouldn't it be great if one of the formalities during job interviews became the trading of radars, personal and company, as a way for each to assess the other? more...
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...more memes...
- Software Architect, Author, & Speaker