Neal Ford

Live online courses, books, and videos on O’Reilly

Upcoming live online training courses

October 2, 2023

Communication Styles for Distributed Architectures and Microservices

Join expert Neal Ford to learn the foundations of distributed architecture communication and discover how they apply to microservices. You’ll explore a new measure, the architecture quantum, to help analyze and ...

October 3, 2023

Comparing Software Architectures

Join experts Neal Ford and Mark Richards for a comparison of various aspects of the same architectural solution, developed independently by isolated teams. Each team’s solution highlights the fact that there ...

October 16, 2023

Tools for Making Major Changes to Architecture

Expert Neal Ford walks you through patterns and anti-patterns, techniques, engineering practices, and other factors that enable architects to make major changes to architectures. You’ll explore several metrics and measures that ...

October 19, November 14 & December 4, 2023

Architectural Katas: Fall 2023

Participants in Architectural Katas, moderated by Neal Ford, work together in small groups of their choosing to solve a challenge an actual organization is facing. Everyone gets the chance to practice ...

October 20, 2023

Designing Distributed Systems

Join coauthors Mark Richards and Neal Ford to get expert guidance on how to analyze trade-offs in these situations. Based on the book Software Architecture: The Hard Parts, the course covers ...

November 1, 2023

Software Architecture Superstream: Data Architecture Styles and Patterns

Achieve new levels of velocity, agility, reliability, and efficiency With an eye to the future, many organizations have made the move to microservices as a means of decomposing monolithic legacy systems. ...

November 7, 2023

Architecture for Modern Engineering Practices

Neal Ford leads a deep dive into the intersection of the architect's role and the engineering practices at the heart of continuous delivery, covering continuous integration, deployment pipelines and how to ...

November 10, 2023

Software architecture by example

In this four-hour intensive course, Mark Richards and Neal Ford—software architects and the authors of numerous books and videos, including the popular video training course series Software Architecture Fundamentals—lead you on ...

November 13, 2023

Mastering Technical Presentations by Example

Join expert Neal Ford to learn techniques for building and delivering excellent presentations, using the pattern–anti-pattern format familiar to developers. You’ll explore presentation patterns across a wide range of topics, including ...

November 28, 2023

Architecture foundations: Styles, patterns, and trade-offs

Join experts Neal Ford and Raju Gandhi for a survey of architecture patterns, applied through modern engineering practices and perspectives. For each pattern, you’ll learn the history, philosophy, rationale, topology, optimum ...

Bio

Neal is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm.

Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video presentations. He is also the author of 6 books, including the most recent Presentation Patterns and Functional Thinking. Given his degree, Neal is a bit of a language geek, with affections including but not limited to Ruby, Clojure, Java, Groovy, JavaScript, Scala and C#/.NET. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal is an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 300 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 2000 presentations. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.