profile

Fran Méndez

Psychology and EDA? Read about my findings this week.

Published about 2 months ago • 2 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:

  1. EDA advocacy
  2. The human side of EDA
  3. EDA governance

Why including the human side and governance parts? Because once you succeed in advocating EDA —getting the necessary buy-in to start up— you'll have to make sure your EDA is sustainable in the long term.
​
It's no secret that I'm not a psychologist or a sociologist. Acknowledging that, this week I started asking some professionals about organizational psychology. You know... internal politics, power dynamics, communication structures, resistance to change, etc.
​
I think this video from Prof. Edgar Schein summarizes my findings this week pretty well:
video preview​

It's funny how coincidences work sometimes. A few days ago, InfoQ released their latest Software Architecture and Design Trends Report. Once again, AsyncAPI was listed there 💪 However, there was something new to me that caught my eye: socio-technical architectures.

The socio-technical architectures concept promotes that we should design our architectures taking into account both the technical aspects of it and the social (human) aspects of it. In other words, design your organization structure to fit the technical architecture. Conway's Law anyone?

Writing Shift is getting super interesting and I hope you'll learn with the book as much as I'm learning writing it. Now the challenge is to make all this information digestible for you.

If you have any recommendations or connections, reply to this email. Let's talk.

Weekly Highlights

Hookdeck Outpost

The folks at Hookdeck released Outpost. Outpost is open source and self-hostable outbound webhooks infrastructure and the first implementation of Event Destinations that enables delivery of your platform events directly to your users' preferred event destinations.

Platformatic Kafka

Platformatic just released a new Kafka client. With built-in support for serialization and deserialization, native TypeScript integration, and a streamlined API, @platformatic/kafka emerges as a compelling choice for developers seeking to build robust and maintainable Kafka-based applications in Node.js.

AsyncAPI Governance Board

At AsyncAPI, we just finished the voting process to create a new Governance Board that will replace the current Executive Director role. I'm incredibly proud of the transparency of the AsyncAPI community.

1 Question For You

Last but not least, I'd love to know a bit more from you. This will help me curate the content of future newsletters. This one is simple!

P.S. If you're stuck, need a second pair of eyes on your architecture, or want personalized guidance to accelerate your project, a 1:1 call can provide the clarity and direction you need. Book Your 1:1 Consultation.​

Av. Joaquín Costa, 16, Badajoz, Badajoz 06001
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​

Fran Méndez

Creator of AsyncAPI | Empowering Staff+ Engineers & Architects to master Event-Driven Architectures with proven tools, processes, and best practices.

Hey hey! I'm Fran, the creator of the AsyncAPI specification (the industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs). Subscribe to my newsletter —The Weekly Shift— where I share expert advice about building Event-Driven Architecture and share my journey writing my first book, Shift: The Playbook for Event-Driven Architecture Advocacy.

Read more from Fran Méndez
A puzzle

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...

6 days 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...

13 days ago • 2 min read
Addressing a culture problem with a tool is like taking a hammer to your own head. The more powerful the tool, the more painful the blow.

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...

20 days ago • 2 min read