September 08, 2015 (Tuesday)
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)
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...
October 16, 2013 (Wednesday)
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...
January 22, 2013 (Tuesday)
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...
June 09, 2010 (Wednesday)
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)
Twitter is a meme abiogenesis pool, helping form a karass around a wampeter more effectively. more...
Neal Ford is a software architect, best-selling technical author, and internationally recognized speaker about software development, particuarlly software architecture. For more than twenty years, he was a Distinguished Engineer at
ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy, always as a member of professional services with a hands-on role. He is also the designer
and developer of all manner of software systems and has written and/or spoken about them in a wide variety of media, including the author and/or editor of
a variety of subjects and technologies, highlighted on my Books page. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at hundreds of
developer conferences worldwide. You can email Neal at neal.ford at gmail.com.
