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.


News and other updates

Bliki: UtilityVsStrategicDichotomy

Thu 29 Jul 2010 09:58

One of the steady themes I've seen throughout my career is that of the nature and importance of software development. Recently a prospect told one of our salespeople that "software is like sewage pipes, I want it to work reliably and I don't want to know about the details". This is the kind of approach that Nicholas Carr talked about in IT Doesn't Matter. On a contrasting note we've done work for many businesses where IT has been a clearer strategic enabler to their business, allowing them to enter new markets or significantly increase their market share. So is IT a utility, like sewage pipes, or a strategic asset?

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Pourquoi, pas comment

Thu 15 Jul 2010 18:24

A couple of weeks ago I was in Paris with Neal Ford to speak at USI 2010. Our talk looked at some aspects of why agile works. Rather than look at the techniques which is how agile does its thing, we looked more at some of the underlying forces - focusing on communication and feedback. The video is now available. (The introduction is in French but the talk is in English. Sadly my French is barely sufficient to order at a restaurant.)

Bliki: TeamRoom

Mon 14 Jun 2010 09:31

A common thing you find in agile projects is that the development team sits in a single open team room. It was advocated early on in Extreme Programming and called out as one of primary practices in the second edition. Agilists favor a open team room as it promotes lots of informal and deep communication between people on the team.

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Craigslist Scam

Tue 08 Jun 2010 10:41

Over the weekend I’ve had a few emails from people in response to scams on craigslist. The scammer has been posting fake job adverts, using my name, for a driver or personal assistant. In case someone checks here I thought I should make it clear that I have never made any postings on craigslist and any postings you see there with my name are false.

Bliki: iPad

Fri 04 Jun 2010 13:49

I've not seen myself as an iFanboy. I didn't get an iPhone for ages after it came out, and only got one because it was the only way to upgrade my data plan to 3G. I use a mac, but I also have an Ubuntu desktop. But I have got an iPad, and I think it's a significant product.

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Brazil Visit

Thu 03 Jun 2010 09:26

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be making my first trip to Brazil (and South America). I’ll arrive in Rio on Jun 13 and give a talk there on the 14th. After that I’ll head over to Porto Alegre and hang out at our office until Agile Brazil, where I’ll be doing a Keynote. My Rio and Agile Brazil talks will be similar - in that I’ll be doing a suite of talks, although I’ll probably not use the same suite in each place.

Continuous Delivery Book

Wed 02 Jun 2010 14:26

My signature series is actually getting two new books, as well as my DSL book, there is a probably more important book on Continuous Delivery. The book is written by two long-time friends and colleagues and talks about how to use deployment pipelines to get you that last mile from Continuous Integration to deployment

As well as the book I'll be doing some tutorials on Continuous Delivery with Jez Humble over the next few months. Our first one is at Agile 2010. You find more details about talks Jez is doing at continuousDelivery.com.

Final Draft of DSL book on RoughCut

Tue 01 Jun 2010 17:27

After sorting out the Final Draft for production, I rebuilt the rough-cut, which is now live on the site.

The biggest change with the content of the Final Draft is that I have three new pattern chapters for external DSLs from my colleague Rebecca Parsons: Regex Table Lexer, Recursive Descent Parser, and Parser Combinator. I’ve also reworked the “Hello Antlr” topic into the Parser Generator pattern.

DSL Book now at Final Draft

Wed 26 May 2010 14:18

I’ve now reached another significant step in my DSL book: Final Draft. This is the moment when I declare that I’m done with my content and release it to production. Copy-editing will begin soon, as well indexing, and various other sundry task to turn final text into a book ready to go to the printers.

It doesn’t mean that I’m completely done with the book. I will have to review the copy edits to ensure they are OK. I will also be working intimately with the production process, helping to improve the output for Safari Books Online and assisting the print production. I’ll also fix any errors spotted in the content, such as from people commenting on the rough-cut.

But the important step is that I’m done with the major thinking. I can’t do any big work on the content now unless it’s an emergency, so I’ll only be tidying up little things. I feel a sense of relief, a knowledge that it’s time to let the book go.

Bliki: CanonS90

Wed 05 May 2010 20:10

Like many obsessive snappers, I've recently got hold of the Canon S90 camera. It's small enough to fit in your pocket, but has the kind of things that people with pretensions to seriousness like: full manual controls, RAW file support, a good sensor, and an f2 lens.

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DSL Book now available as rough-cut

Mon 26 Apr 2010 16:01

My DSL book is now available as a rough-cut on safari books online. If you’re a member of safari you can see the book and make comments on it. If you’re not a member you can only see the TOC, preface, and first chapter.

I’m very keen to hear comments, so if you take a look do let me know what you think. I’m particularly interested in any errors I’ve made so I can fix them before we chop down the trees. Please, however, remember this is a rough-cut; in particular it hasn’t been through copy-editing. So expect speeling errors and mistakes grammatical - you don’t need to flag those as they should get picked up once the copy-editors are set on it.

I’m told I’m the very first author to produce the safari files myself using an automated book production process. Apart from the glow of vanity, a practical consequence of this is that I can (and will) generate updates as I put together useful updates. I’ll announce any updates here and on my twitter stream.

The cover of my Next Book

Fri 23 Apr 2010 09:37

Books in my signature series use photos of bridges, in homage to my wife's profession. This bridge is The Iron Bridge, the first bridge in the world to be made of iron, back in 1781. It's a symbol of the industrial revolution, which began near where I grew up in the Black Country. The photo is my own, which I took earlier this year. The design of the bridge looks somewhat unusual, nobody had built an iron bridge before, so they built it like they would build a wooden bridge. It took Thomas Telford to really use iron effectively in bridges.

Speaking in Atlanta and San Francisco Area

Wed 21 Apr 2010 19:33

I’ve got a couple of US speaking trips coming up, organized by ThoughtWorks. Next week (28-29 April) I’m off to Atlanta to give a couple of talks. Then in May (11-12) I’m in the San Francisco area to speak both down in the valley and in the city. As is my style these days, I’ll be doing a suite of talks on various topics that I’m currently interested in, so while I can’t say exactly what I’ll talk about, the talks will be the kinds of stuff I write about here. They’re all free events, so at least you have a good chance of getting value for money.

photo of Martin Fowler

photo: Adewale Oshineye



Upcoming Talks
Aug
9Agile 2010: Orlando, FL
Sep
15,16Agile Australia: Melbourne
Oct
7JAOO: Aarhus
14-15Agile China: Beijing