Neal Ford
where else to find them
bluesky:nealford.bsky.social
x:neal4d
what they talk about
all 14 in the filters
where they keep going back
- Craft Conference3 editions2019–2025
- O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference New York, NY2 editions2015–2019
all 14 in the filters
on a stage with
- Oleksii Petrovonce
who talks about the same things
- Eric Normand9 talks
- Stefan Tilkov11 talks
- Victor Rentea45 talks
- Dave Thomas33 talks
- Mark Richards33 talks
- Einar W. Høst30 talks
| title | conference | date |
|---|---|---|
| The Intersection of Fitness Function driven Architecture and Agentic AI | AI Native DevCon Fall 2025 | 2025-11-18 |
Claim: small, 10–15 line architectural fitness functions actually prevent big failures—examples include ArcUnit (Java), ArcUnit TS, Piest Arc and Arc Go… | ||
| Aspect-oriented Architecture | Craft Conference 2025 | 2025-05-29 |
Argues that architecture becomes code by running concrete architectural fitness functions (examples: ArcUnit/ArcUnit.net, pytest-arc, TSARC) to enforce rules… | ||
| Understanding Modern Trade-off Analysis in Software Architecture | Software Architecture Gathering – Digital 2023 | 2023-11-27 |
Compares two concrete patterns for order/payment/inventory: hydrate full payload (one DB access, better scalability, but causes stamp coupling, contract… | ||
| Granularity and Communication in Microservice Architectures | Agile meets Architecture Berlin 2023 | 2023-10-05 |
Introduces the architecture quantum as a metric, gives five disintegrators (functionality, volatility, scalability, fault tolerance, security) and three… | ||
| Q&A session with Neal Ford | Software Architecture fwdays'23 | 2023-09-19 |
Claims concrete enough to act on include treating architecture fitness functions as unit tests for performance, scalability and supply‑chain safety… | ||
| Meta modern Software Architecture | Great International Developer Summit 2023 | 2023-04-25 |
Argues that architecture styles emerge from new capabilities rather than ivory‑tower ideas and makes concrete prescriptions: codifies two laws (everything is a… | ||
| Granularity & Communication for Microservice Architectures | Great International Developer Summit 2023 | 2023-04-25 |
Provides concrete rules: use five disintegrators (functionality, volatility, scalability/throughput, reliability, security) and three integrators… | ||
| Software Architecture: The Hard Parts | Great International Developer Summit 2023 | 2023-04-25 |
Argues there are no universal best practices and advocates iterative design using concrete tools: build candidate architectures, apply five disintegrators… | ||
| Granularity & Communication for Microservices Architectures | Craft Conference 2022 | 2022-06-02 |
Explains a concrete tradeoff method for microservice granularity using five disintegrators and three integrators to iterate service boundaries, shows how… | ||
| Software Architecture by Example | Devnexus 2022 | 2022-04-12 |
Uses an architecture kata to design an online auction that must scale from hundreds to thousands of participants, concluding the domain forces a distributed… | ||
| Meta Modern Software Architecture | Devnexus 2022 | 2022-04-12 |
Argues that architecture styles emerge from new platform capabilities and that a metamodern holism demands trade-off analysis not silver bullets. Cites the… | ||
| Mastering Technical Presentations By Example | Developers Summit 2021 | 2021-02-18 |
Explains concrete presentation techniques and surprising trade-offs: use PowerPoint/Keynote for time control, avoid turning info decks into slides, and prefer… | ||
| Architecture Foundations: Styles & Patterns (2021) | Developers Summit 2021 | 2021-02-18 |
Compares concrete architecture styles and tradeoffs: layered monolith is single deployment with poor scalability; microkernel (plugin) fits heavy… | ||
| Design Patterns in Dynamic and Functional Languages | Developer Summit 2020 | 2020-11-21 |
Claims that many GoF patterns either disappear or change implementation in modern languages, with concrete examples: closures replace Command (Groovy/Ruby… | ||
| Communication Patterns in Microservices | Developer Summit 2020 | 2020-11-21 |
Introduces the architecture quantum as an independently deployable unit with high cohesion and a synchronous/asynchronous coupling metric called quantum… | ||
| Agile Engineering: The Hard Parts | Developer Summit 2020 | 2020-11-21 |
Argues that architectural governance must be automated using fitness functions (unit-test‑like checks) and shows tools: JDepend/ArchUnit/net‑archtest for… | ||
| Data Mesh: Beyond the Data Lake | Developer Summit 2020 | 2020-11-21 |
Argues that replacing centralized lakes with domain-aligned data products plus a shared data sidecar yields four concrete principles (domain-driven ownership… | ||
| Software Architecture by Example | Developer Summit 2020 | 2020-11-21 |
Designs an online-auction system for hundreds up to thousands of concurrent bidders, using separate components for auction session, bid tracker, bid capture… | ||
| Architecture Foundations: Styles & Patterns | Developer Summit 2020 | 2020-11-21 |
Compares concrete architectures and when to pick them: uses ArcUnit and NetArchTest for automated governance; shows Eclipse as a micro‑kernel success and warns… | ||
| Building Evolutionary Architectures | Craft Conference 2019 | 2019-05-07 |
Argues that evolvability is a measurable property enforced by executable checks called architectural fitness functions, not vague wishes. Shows concrete tools… | ||
| From the Trenches: An Interview with Mark Richards | O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2019 - New York, New York | 2019-02-04 |
Recounts a Honeywell TBM conversion that converts Honeywell assembler to C, has no documentation so the team reverse-engineered business rules, finishes on… | ||
| Building Microservice Architectures | Voxxed Days Vienna 2016 | 2016-03-16 |
Explains how microservices use domain-driven bounded contexts and continuous delivery to make change cheap, with concrete tradeoffs: a config service handling… | ||
| Evolutionary Software Architectures | Voxxed Days Vienna 2016 | 2016-03-16 |
Defines an architecture that supports guided, incremental change along multiple dimensions and uses fitness functions (metrics or tests) to steer evolution… | ||
| the growing role of software architects | O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015 | 2015-03-16 |
Claim: software architects must stay hands-on and account for operations not just models, with microservices forcing architecture into integration work and… | ||
| 5 Reasons To Attend | O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015 | 2015-03-16 |
Five concrete benefits: a focused track that helps developers upskill into architects with hands-on sessions and practical patterns; case studies that map… | ||
| Emergent Design | GOTO Aarhus 2013 | 2013-09-30 |
Argues that design should emerge from code using measurable techniques: run cyclomatic-complexity and afferent-coupling tools (CKJM, Sonar), spot hotspots like… | ||
| (Neal's) Master Plan for Clojure Enterprise Mindshare Domination | Clojure/conj 2011 | 2011-11-10 |
Plans to win Enterprise mindshare focus on reducing risk and sneaking Clojure into existing stacks: push CTO-friendly signals (hireability, stability), seed… | ||
| part1 – Neal Ford | JDD 2008 | 2008-10-01 |
Argues that Language Oriented Programming is an evolutionary step beyond framework-driven Java, claiming domain-specific languages let teams raise abstraction… | ||
| part3 – Neal Ford | JDD 2008 | 2008-10-01 |
Argues that building software around domain specific languages reduces noise and makes intent visible, contrasting Java boilerplate with select from customer… | ||
| part4 – Neal Ford | JDD 2008 | 2008-10-01 |
Argues that designing APIs as sentences produces clearer code and shows concrete DSLs and tools that do this now including Hamcrest included with JUnit 4… | ||
| Part5 | JDD 2008 | 2008-10-01 |
Argues that XML is deprecated for configuration and that heavy XML in Java adds accidental complexity; shows Ant creator James Duncan Davidson abandoning XML… | ||
| part6 – Neal Ford | JDD 2008 | 2008-10-01 |
Shows that the same DSL code can execute same DSL in different contexts to produce SQL DDL or Graphviz dot ER diagrams, proving declarative intent yields… | ||
| part7 – Neal Ford | JDD 2008 | 2008-10-01 |
Shows a working approach using MPS to build external DSLs and a rich editor that recognizes dates, currency and formulas so configuration looks like a smart… | ||
| part2 – Neal Ford | JDD 2008 | 2008-10-01 |
Argues Java is now a framework-oriented language and shows concrete code that parses mainframe fixed‑width records where the first four chars pick the record… | ||
| nothing matches | ||