Tim serves as the VP of Developer Relations at IBM, where he and his team work to make certain parts of the IBM portfolio more accessible to developers. He is a regular speaker at conferences and a presence on YouTube explaining complex technology topics in an accessible way. He lives with his wife in Arvada, CO. He has three grown children, three step-children, and four grandchildren, with a fifth on the way.
Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.
Normally simple tasks like running a program or storing and retrieving data become much more complicated when we start to do them on collections of computers, rather than single machines. Distributed systems has become a key architectural concern, and affects everything a program would normally do—giving us enormous power, but at the cost of increased complexity as well.
Event-driven architectures are not new, but they are newly ascendant. For the first time since the client-server revolution of 40 years ago, a new architectural paradigm is changing the way we build systems. Apache Kafka and microservices are at the center of this movement.