I’m deep in the writing process for my new book, Shift: The Playbook for Event-Driven Architecture Advocacy. An important part of the book is psychological safety. Why? Because I’ve seen it time and again: most big tech transformations don’t fail on the tech, they fail on the people. To make this point crystal clear, I needed a powerful, real-world story. So I hit up my friend, Fran Arismendi. Fran’s a world-class Chilean psychologist who, in a cool turn of events, is now my neighbor here in...
6 days ago • 6 min read
Seventeen months ago, I was completely burned out. I felt drained, disconnected, and like I was running on a treadmill I couldn’t get off. Many of you in tech know the feeling. The constant pressure, the endless to-do lists, the feeling that you’re never doing enough. Today, things are completely different. I’ve found a sense of balance and happiness that I didn’t think was possible back then. It wasn’t about finding a new productivity hack or a better time management system. It was about a...
17 days ago • 4 min read
I've spent the last few weeks on over 20 calls with all kinds of companies. From tiny startups to huge enterprises. Every single one of them is wrestling with Event-Driven Architecture, trying to make sense of its promise and its messy reality. And as I listened, patterns started jumping out at me. We're not just talking about tech problems here. We're hitting the deep, human stuff that comes with a big shift like this. One story kept popping up, louder than all the others: culture. Forget...
5 months ago • 3 min read
Writing Shift is proving to be challenging to me. Not in a bad way but in a really really good way. Yesterday, in a conversation with Laïla Bougriâ, I told her that I'm writing the book for me, to learn. Obviously, I'm taking into account the target audience all the time but, even this, is part of the challenge. It's not the first time I've done this though. When I drafted the first AsyncAPI specification, I did it for me, so I could learn the ins and outs of OpenAPI and also Event-Driven...
5 months ago • 2 min read
This week, I had an interesting discussion with a client. It's a Civil Engineering corporation that's present in multiple continents. The "company culture" challenge becomes especially important when different cultures all around the globe are mixed toward a same goal. Building a globally-distributed Event-Driven Architecture is no exception. Everywhere I look, people are trying to fix culture problems with tools. Not because they're dumb or stupid, actually, I'd have committed the same...
5 months ago • 2 min read
I have a story that I often tell my clients —and that I'm going to make sure it's on my book too. It happens more often than not. It probably happened or will happen to you as well. For privacy reasons, I'm omitting some info but the core lesson remains. Back in the days, a friend and I were hired to build an internal integration platform. That is, a internal platform that would allow the rest of the teams to quickly build and deploy new integrations with third-party products. There were...
5 months ago • 3 min read
Kafka, AMQP, MQTT over HTTP/3? This week I posted a video on YouTube and LinkedIn throwing some thoughts that were coming to my head week after week: We all work with messaging systems: Kafka for high-throughput streams, AMQP for complex enterprise routing, MQTT for IoT and lightweight pub/sub. They're powerful, but most still run on raw TCP connections, just like they have for years. Now, HTTP/3 (running on QUIC) is here, offering a ton of under-the-hood improvements: faster handshakes...
6 months ago • 5 min read
The psychology of EDA This week has been exciting for me. Writing Shift requires me to research and talk to many different people. In this case, I reached out to a psychologist to educate me on organizational psychology. And you may be wondering why I'm researching this psychology to write Shift in the first place, right? Let me explain... Shift stands on three pillars: EDA advocacy The human side of EDA EDA governance Why including the human side and governance parts? Because once you...
6 months ago • 2 min read