Martin Fowler

I am an author, speaker, and consultant on the design of enterprise software. On this site I keep as much information as I can on-line. There are links to my books, various on-line articles, and links to areas relevant to my work. My primary areas of involvement are in object-oriented development, refactoring, patterns, agile methods, enterprise application architecture, domain modeling, and extreme programming. I work for ThoughtWorks, an outstanding application development and consulting company.

Site Updates and Other News

29 Jun 09: Revitalizing Enterprise Software: AMP, an Australian financial services company, ran an internal conference called Amplify. They asked me to talk about agile software development. I thought about how to make this best fit into the overall flow of the conference, particularly since I expected a significant part of the audience to not be part of IT. I settled on talking about how IT projects can be infrastructural or strategic. This classification alters how you approach the projects, in particular on the way IT and business people should collaborate.
26 Jun 09: Agilists and Architects: Allies not Adversaries: At QCon San Francisco 2008 Rebecca Parsons and I gave a talk about how agile approaches work with enterprise architecture groups. At the moment there's a lot of distrust and conflict between agile project teams and architecture groups. We dig into why this is so, and explore ways that these groups can work together.
11 Jun 09: Ruby at ThoughtWorks: ThoughtWorks started using Ruby for production projects in 2006, from then till the end of 2008 we had done 41 ruby projects. In preparation for a talk at QCon I surveyed these projects to examine what lessons we can draw from the experience. I describe our thoughts so far on common questions about Ruby's productivity, speed and maintainability. So far our conclusions are that Ruby is a viable platform that should be seriously considered for many forms of applications - in particular web applications using Ruby on Rails. I also go through some technical lessons, including some thoughts on testing with Active Record.
10 Jun 09: Google I/O Talk on Cloud: Rebecca Parsons and I talk about Google App Engine and the general world of clouds. In the first bit I talk about things various ThoughtWorkers learned from experiementing with App Engine, highlighting issues with testing, persistance, and concurrency. In the second part Rebecca talks about the broader issues enterprises will face with moving to the cloud.
04 Jun 09: Hot topics panel Jun 10, Chicago.: I'm in Chicago next week for a major get-together of many of the leading technologists in ThoughtWorks world-wide. The Chicago Business Development people are determined to take advantage of us, so they've set up a panel to discuss hot topics in technology at lunchtime. It's quite the amazing group of people: Rebecca Parsons, Ian Cartwright, Ola Bini, Erik Döernenburg, Neal Ford, Pramod Sadalage, and Josh Graham.
04 Jun 09: Catching up with videos: One of the main things I've not been getting around to announcing are various videos that have appeared of me jabbering on. Newish ones include a meta-introduction to DSLs, and interview on DSLs with Chris Sells (where I win a gold star for insensitivity by calling his newest pride-and-joy "19th century"), a JAOO 2008 panel interview on DSLs, and the QCon London keynote on software used by the Obama campaign.
04 Jun 09: Using Twitter: I've been remiss about keeping the news column here up to date, partly because it needs some serious work on the publishing code, partly because I'm trying to focus on the DSL book, but partly because I've started to announce things on twitter.

photo: Adewale Oshineye

Upcoming Talks
Oct
5-7	JAOO: Aarhus
12-16	Microsoft P&P: Redmond, WA
Nov
16-17	QCon: San Francisco