Gregor’s Ramblings on Writing - Enterprise Integration Patterns

This blog chronicles my journey with asynchronous and distributed system design over two decades. These are my Ramblings related to Writing [See all Ramblings]. Subscribe to my ramblings via RSS.

Find my posts on IT strategy, enterprise architecture, and digital transformation at ArchitectElevator.com.

About two years ago, I revived the ramblings from a four-year hibernation. Upon resurrection, the ramblings started to take a broader scope, including not only messaging, conversations, and patterns, but also communication and IT architecture topics. The new topics were a natural reflection of my new role as Chief Architect in a massive IT transformation and after a little while I decided that they deserve their own channel, so I wrote a book about it. Read more »

Architects can often be found commenting or complaining that many things in IT are the same old stuff in new packaging, created by marketing departments who were in need of a new buzzword. For example, aren't microservices really just SOA done right while SOA itself stands for "Same Old Architecture"? And the whole reactive movement seems to have re-discovered callbacks. Maybe there is some truth in this as at the recent SATURN conferences I found myself saying more often than I had expected "I blogged about this". So let's see which of my past ramblings are still relevant these days. Read more »

One advantage of working for a relatively large organization is that I get to do a little more writing again. Not because I have spare time, but because in times of rapid change, communication across a large audience is critically important. It turns out, short papers are a good way to achieve that and my brief, but accurate technical position / decision papers have become a trademark of my architecture group (don't worry, we architects produce more than just paper). Correspondingly, one of my daily struggles is to convince others to write as well and to coach them to become better writers. In a sense, this forces me to transport what I know about writing from purely procedural knowledge, i.e. I know how to do it, to declarative knowledge, i.e. being able to understand why it is done and to describe to others how to do it. While this rambling's title is a pun on the popular books "Japanese for busy People", it intentionally implies an ambiguity that we are both writing for a busy audience, but are busy authors as well. Read more »

At a recent presentation, Martin Fowler introduced himself as a guy "who is good at explaining things". While this certainly has a touch of British Understatement™, it also highlights a critically important but rare skill in IT. As technology invades all parts of personal and professional lives, causing companies to absolutely depend on software and systems, decision makers often can no longer keep track of technical details. Because architects live at the intersection of technology and business, it is their responsibility to explain complex topics and highlight the ramifications of technical decisions. Read more »

Drawing a picture turns out to be a useful system design technique. Read more »

My New Year's resolution was to write more, so here my thoughts on how to actually make that happen. In a sense it's a plan for myself to be more productive, but hopefully the ideas also work for other folks. Ironically, my work on EIP II has been stalled for a good while, so you're getting advice on how to be a prolific writer from someone who has not written much in 2 years. Read on at your own risk. Read more »

The beginning of a New Year is the time to reflect on the past and make resolutions for the future. It's become my tradition to kick off the year with some reflection on EIP, so here we go. Read more »

The end of the year is always the time to reflect on the past happenings. My friends in Japan often send a New Year's card with 12 pictures, each showing the significant event during the month. I am not sure something significant related to Enterprise Integration Patterns happened each month, but I think it's still nice to reflect a little bit on the history and current state of the patterns. After all, the patterns have matured from a draft paper to being adopted as the lingua franca for a number of open source messaging projects. Read more »

Last time I claimed that users like events. This time I want to show how I fulfilled my personal desire for events off the Web. I built two solutions to alert me to new book reviews on Amazon, one using a Python script, the other using Yahoo! Pipes. Read more »

Beginning of this year I submitted an article to a renowned software publication who is running a special issue on software patterns. Sadly, my article did not make it into the magazine but I decided to publish an expanded version on my site. Hey, I got to make it worth your time following my ramblings! Am I bitter that my article was rejected? Not at all, but if I ever get a hold of these #^%#$& -bleep- of a -bleep- I'll... Read more »

I have been pretty quiet recently, but I finally have some results to show. The current issue of IEEE Internet Computing (May/June 2007) contains my guest column for "Toward Integration". Also, I authored one chapter in the upcoming book "SOA Expertenwissen" (in German). Read more »

Hanging out with my intellectual drinking buddies reminded me that our integration patterns have been embraced by a fair number of commercial as well as open source projects. In my eyes this is really the best indicator of success for a pattern language. Latin, a dead language used mostly by doctors to sound more knowledgeable, is not a good model for a pattern language. You want a language that is alive and actually used by people. Talking to a few folks who did embrace our language motivated me to take a quick survey of the places where our patterns pop up. Read more »