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Announcing NSBcon

Thursday, March 13th, 2014

NSBconI am most thrilled to announce the first NSBcon!

<Applause/>

It’s been a long time since my first blog post on NServiceBus (about 7 years ago) and the community has come a long way since then.

In any case, this won’t be a “looking back” post but rather one looking forwards.

In addition to myself and the rest of the crew, we’ve got some great speakers coming out including the inimitable Greg Young and the formidable Ayende Rahien (aka Oren Eini).

Register here.

For those of you who can’t make it to London for June 26-27, we’ll be running another NSBcon in The Big Apple (New York City) on September 29-30. Register here

If you’d really like to come but have to pay out of pocket (either because you’re a contractor or your employer just won’t pay), send an email to nsbcon@particular.net and we’ll get you a nice discount, but please hurry as we don’t have many of these tickets left.

Hope to see you there!



NServiceBus Partial Update for 2013

Wednesday, January 1st, 2014

2013_newyearWhat with the end of the calendar year, it feels like I should be writing some kind of yearly summary of what’s been going on with NServiceBus.

While we’ve been making some pretty amazing progress, it still a bit premature for big announcements.

In any case, here’s a partial list of goings-on:

Monitoring – sneak peek

One of the most requested additions to NServiceBus was strong production monitoring capabilities.

Some of the things we have coming include:

1. Endpoints periodically send heartbeats to a central location, and if they stop coming, the administrator gets notified.
2. If messages can’t be processed for some reason and are sent to the error queue, the administrator gets a nice visual notification with the ability to send the message to be reprocessed.
3. Developers can also plug in their own custom code to periodically report on various things, for example the existence of a folder, accessibility of a URL, etc.

Check out this short video to see how it all works:

And yes – it will work across all our supported transports (MSMQ, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, SQL Server) as well as in the cloud (on Azure).

Partners

This was also a big year for the larger ecosystem.

In addition to our long-time partner Headspring, home of the legendary Jimmy Bogard, many more companies are now Official Partners.

I don’t want to play favorites here so this list is not in any particular order (except alphabetical). There are also a number of independent consultants that do amazing work but I’m not including them here for brevity so you might see some prominent countries not listed.

In the US, we have:

ILM also happens to be the home of David Boike – one of our community champions and author of the first NServiceBus book.

In Europe, we have:

  • BBV – focusing on Switzerland, Germany, and Austria
  • InfoSupport – focusing on the Netherlands
  • WebStep – focusing on Scandinavia

BBV were the ones who did the heavy lifting for getting our support for ActiveMQ off the ground.

And not to forget the folks down under, there’s Driven Logic in the Sydney area.

Keep an eye out as there’ll be some interesting things coming from our partners this coming year.

In Closing

I’ll close with some thank-you’s:

Thank you to the hundreds of new paying customers, as well as to the customers who’ve stuck by us over the years who make it possible for us to make enterprise development on .net that much more enjoyable.

Thank you to all the employees at Particular Software – now twice as many as there were last year, and probably going to double again in 2014. This team, I’ve got to tell you, is absolutely world-class.

Thank you, my dear reader, for coming back and reading my rambling thoughts time after time. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this 10 years now.

And, to my wife and kids, well, they don’t read my blog, but on the off chance they might one day, I’d better thank them as well.

I wish you all a wonderful 2014.



OMG – 10 years of blogging

Tuesday, December 31st, 2013

birthday10As I was in the middle of writing a year’s summary post for NServiceBus, I got to wondering, how long have I actually been blogging?

I looked back in the archives and, all of sudden feeling much MUCH older, I realized that it’s now been 10 years.

A decade.

<Mind reeling />

Here’s a snippet from my first blog post:

“I’m not really sure I can say exactly what I’m going to be talking about, and, I must say, I find it to be somewhat unusual to start writing at some anonymous URL and hoping that somebody will find it and read what I have to say.”

What a journey it’s been – wow.

Thinking that there might actually be people who’ve been reading that long – that blows my mind.

Thank you for lending me your ears (and eyes) all this time.

<Humbled />



Thoughts on a career in software development

Friday, December 27th, 2013

helping_handFor much of the history of computers, programmers really only had one path to take – upward into management.

While you could go from Junior Programmer to Senior Programmer, sooner or later you were faced with the choice of becoming a Team Lead or having your career stagnate.

The primary difficult with becoming a team lead is that the skills that made you an excellent Senior Programmer didn’t really carry over to leading a team.

On leading teams

Much ink has been spilled (and keyboards been pounded) on this topic, so I’ll just give the common solution that is proposed to this issue – having a parallel technical career track to the traditional management track.

After being a senior programmer, developers can grow into architects and upwards. IBM, for example, has the title “Fellow” reserved for this ultimate level.

An IBM Fellow is an appointed position at IBM made by IBM’s CEO. Typically only 4 to 9 IBM Fellows are appointed each year in May or June. It is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. —Wikipedia

All that’s well and good, but I have a feeling that something is still missing.

Why does it have to be either/or?

What if we allowed, nay – encouraged, developers to try both types of roles as they advance in their career?

After your first year as a senior programmer, you are then assigned to be a mentor to a junior programmer. You don’t assign them work, but take responsibility for some of their professional development. During this time, you also start learning what it takes to be a good team lead and developing your soft skills – yourself being mentored by a more senior team lead (probably not a good idea for it to be the team lead on the project you’re working on). From there, you take on a team lead role on a small-ish project leading 2-3 other developers.

During your time as a team lead, architects in the company work with you to deepen your technical knowledge of larger system concerns – grooming you for your next role: an architect. Your experience as a team lead gives you new found appreciation for managing technical risk.

Later, as an architect with developed soft-skills, you are now much more capable of getting teams to adopt your ideas and to want to do “the right thing”, rather than just deliver the project any way they know how. Even as you develop your expertise in various technological areas, the organization has an eye on bringing you back to being a team lead, this time on a larger project.

In praise of the zigzag

I think this has actually been happening more than just a little in our industry, although I believe it usually happens as people move from one company to another.

Is it possible that the limitations of the structures in their previous companies contributed to their choice to move to another company? Well, I wouldn’t discount it.

I don’t think companies should pigeonhole developers – either you’re an X or a Y.

Human beings thrive on variety and occasionally stretching out of their comfort zone.

I believe this model optimizes for people’s personal growth and can be tuned quite easily.

I think this is also very much in alignment with the Software Craftsmanship movement and can make it easier for companies to develop and hold on to the talent they’ve been lucky enough to hire in the first place.

In closing

While I believe this model is workable for a lot of the software industry, both for consulting companies and internal development organization, it’s clearly not going to be applicable for small startups. That being said, if the startup is successful and starts growing, it might not be such a bad idea to lay the groundwork for the team early on.

I don’t claim that this is the “best model” out there, and I haven’t tried it myself (yet), but I do believe that it has potential and would love to (re)spark the conversation about processes and structure that has seemed to die down under the Agile maxim of “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” (though I believe that Agile as a whole *has* gotten us pointed in a better direction than where the industry was before).

What are your thoughts?

Write a comment or, even better, write something on your blog and spread the word!



NServiceBus Training – 2013

Wednesday, November 6th, 2013

Although I’ve been scaling back the training I do myself in order to focus on driving the next generation of our service platform, our good friends and partners at Headspring and ILM have stepped up to bring public NServiceBus courses to a location near you.

For the complete list, see http://particular.net/courses-and-events.

Jimmy Bogard will be coming back to London next week to teach the Enterprise Development with NServiceBus course – Nov 11-14. Register here.

David Boike, author of the first NServiceBus book, will be teaching that same course in Minneapolis USA next month – Dec 9-12. Register here.

*

If you’re not up for the full, intensive, 4-day deep-dive – there’s still something for you:

Mauro Servienti will be speaking at the Italian Developer Conference in Milan on Nov 27 about the use of NServiceBus in Azure. Check it out.

And, even though it’s not technically in 2013:

Jimmy Bogard will be delivering a 1-day NServiceBus crash-course at the CodeMash in Sandusky Ohio on Jan 7. Although it’s only been a week since registration has opened, CodeMash is sold out but if you’re already registered, make sure to go and see Jimmy. He’s a great presenter.

*

And, just so that you can get in early before this sells out too, I’ll be offering my 5-day SOA course again next year – first in London and then in New York City. The date for NYC isn’t set yet, but London is good to go: March 24-28, 2014.

Register here.

There’s also a 10% discount if you book before Jan 23.

Hope to see you there!



On Mookid joining NServiceBus, and what that means for Rebus

Wednesday, September 11th, 2013

mogensWhile I don’t generally blog about it when we hire people here at
Particular Software (as we’ve been roughly doubling our size each year), this situation is slightly different.

Mogens Heller Grabe, creator of Rebus, will be joining us.

The advantages to the NServiceBus community are pretty clear – having more people in the core team with experience building service bus technology will help us get more done, faster.

What I want to talk about is the impact to the larger open-source ecosystem.

On Open Source

Although NServiceBus moved away from the permissive Apache license some time ago, the source is still and will continue to be available under the OSI approved Reciprocal Public License.

Rebus has always been licensed under the permissive Apache license and, as far as I know, will continue that way.

In order to make sure that the Rebus code base is in no way tainted and ensure that its users remain protected, Mogens will not be able to continue contributing code to Rebus. To hear Mogens comments on this change, see his blog post on the topic.

So you’re killing Rebus?!

That question always come up whenever some company hires someone whose working on an open-source project, doesn’t it? I can only speak for NServiceBus here, but our focus is on getting additional talent – growing the team, so that we can achieve all the great things we’ve got planned, not on killing anything.

I don’t think we could “kill” Rebus even if we wanted to. There is a thriving community of users and committers around Rebus who have the choice and ability to keep it going (or not).

And there isn’t really anything that we could gain commercially from the death of Rebus – its users probably wouldn’t switch to NServiceBus anyway. If anything, they’d most likely go with one of the other free, open source service buses out there – most notably, Mass Transit.

So, it’s just business as usual then

Pretty much.

We’re going to continue hiring more people to help realize our vision of the Particular Service Platform, as well as partnering with companies that help complement this vision (like we’ve done in the past with RavenDB).

And if you’re either an independent consultant or working at a consulting company and have experience delivering NServiceBus projects, we have an interesting proposal for you, so please contact us.

Exciting things are coming.



The “Ask Udi” podcast is back

Friday, June 21st, 2013

Given the overwhelming feedback to revive the “Ask Udi” podcast, how could I refuse.

Please submit your questions over here or vote on questions that other people have asked.

Even if you don’t have a specific question, please feel free to suggest a topic that you’d like me to rant about (CQRS for example).

The podcast used to be supported by an online magazine and I didn’t think to back up the old podcast episodes so some have been lost in the ether, but you can find some of the history here: http://www.udidahan.com/category/ask-udi-podcast/.

Let’s see if we can get a podcast out by the end of next week – so go and suggest the topics you want to here about:

Submit your topic now



Recording of my June 2013 Q&A at Skills Matter online

Thursday, June 13th, 2013

When I was in London last week teaching my 5-day course I gave an open Q&A on one of the evenings. The recording of that talk is now online here.

It was interesting to see that while many people came to the Q&A, there weren’t a whole lot with questions.

In any case, I was wondering if online the situation would be much different.

Some time ago I had a monthly podcast called “Ask Udi” and I was thinking of reviving that.

What do you think? Is that something you’d like? Leave me a comment.

And if you missed the course in London, I’m giving just one more course this year – here in Israel from June 30 – July 4. For details and registration, check out the Sela website.



Dennis does High Availability, the full story

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

It looks like my previous post worked – Dennis put up a nice meaty blog post about his experiences applying the principles of my course to a tightly-coupled legacy code base.

Here’s the punchline:

“By using messaging, queues, and publish/subscribe patterns, we were able to upgrade a core part of our system without touching any other parts – even those that it communicates with on an ongoing basis. During the short period of time that it was down, the queues took care of buffering the communication for that service without affecting anything else. The system as a whole was never really down.

This was a totally new experience for our company – an upgrade without downtime, even with the thousands of websites we’re running.”

Read the full story.

By the way, if your in the Netherlands next week, you can catch Dennis speaking about these topics at the Dutch .NET User Group. You can get all the info and register here.



Course feedback from Canada

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

I just love getting emails from people who’ve attended my course and are now in a place where they’ve been able to apply what they’ve learned. Sean from Canada sent me this:

“It’s the first project I’ve been able to use the principles from your course and the resulting codebase is so simple. I was able to add reporting module without changing a line of existing code just by subscribing to events. Awesome. Keeping everything explicit is the best was to keep it simple which i find is easier developing for mobile. I’m sure there is lots I could improve. I’d like to take course again one day.”

This right here is what I use as an answer when people ask me, “don’t you get tired of giving the same course over and over again?”

Quite simply – I don’t. There’s really nothing quite like having this kind of impact on people.



   


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Recommendations

Bryan Wheeler, Director Platform Development at msnbc.com
Udi Dahan is the real deal.

We brought him on site to give our development staff the 5-day “Advanced Distributed System Design” training. The course profoundly changed our understanding and approach to SOA and distributed systems.

Consider some of the evidence: 1. Months later, developers still make allusions to concepts learned in the course nearly every day 2. One of our developers went home and made her husband (a developer at another company) sign up for the course at a subsequent date/venue 3. Based on what we learned, we’ve made constant improvements to our architecture that have helped us to adapt to our ever changing business domain at scale and speed If you have the opportunity to receive the training, you will make a substantial paradigm shift.

If I were to do the whole thing over again, I’d start the week by playing the clip from the Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the choice between the red and blue pills. Once you make the intellectual leap, you’ll never look at distributed systems the same way.

Beyond the training, we were able to spend some time with Udi discussing issues unique to our business domain. Because Udi is a rare combination of a big picture thinker and a low level doer, he can quickly hone in on various issues and quickly make good (if not startling) recommendations to help solve tough technical issues.” November 11, 2010

Sam Gentile Sam Gentile, Independent WCF & SOA Expert
“Udi, one of the great minds in this area.
A man I respect immensely.”





Ian Robinson Ian Robinson, Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks
"Your blog and articles have been enormously useful in shaping, testing and refining my own approach to delivering on SOA initiatives over the last few years. Over and against a certain 3-layer-application-architecture-blown-out-to- distributed-proportions school of SOA, your writing, steers a far more valuable course."

Shy Cohen Shy Cohen, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft
“Udi is a world renowned software architect and speaker. I met Udi at a conference that we were both speaking at, and immediately recognized his keen insight and razor-sharp intellect. Our shared passion for SOA and the advancement of its practice launched a discussion that lasted into the small hours of the night.
It was evident through that discussion that Udi is one of the most knowledgeable people in the SOA space. It was also clear why – Udi does not settle for mediocrity, and seeks to fully understand (or define) the logic and principles behind things.
Humble yet uncompromising, Udi is a pleasure to interact with.”

Glenn Block Glenn Block, Senior Program Manager - WCF at Microsoft
“I have known Udi for many years having attended his workshops and having several personal interactions including working with him when we were building our Composite Application Guidance in patterns & practices. What impresses me about Udi is his deep insight into how to address business problems through sound architecture. Backed by many years of building mission critical real world distributed systems it is no wonder that Udi is the best at what he does. When customers have deep issues with their system design, I point them Udi's way.”

Karl Wannenmacher Karl Wannenmacher, Senior Lead Expert at Frequentis AG
“I have been following Udi’s blog and podcasts since 2007. I’m convinced that he is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced people in the field of SOA, EDA and large scale systems.
Udi helped Frequentis to design a major subsystem of a large mission critical system with a nationwide deployment based on NServiceBus. It was impressive to see how he took the initial architecture and turned it upside down leading to a very flexible and scalable yet simple system without knowing the details of the business domain. I highly recommend consulting with Udi when it comes to large scale mission critical systems in any domain.”

Simon Segal Simon Segal, Independent Consultant
“Udi is one of the outstanding software development minds in the world today, his vast insights into Service Oriented Architectures and Smart Clients in particular are indeed a rare commodity. Udi is also an exceptional teacher and can help lead teams to fall into the pit of success. I would recommend Udi to anyone considering some Architecural guidance and support in their next project.”

Ohad Israeli Ohad Israeli, Chief Architect at Hewlett-Packard, Indigo Division
“When you need a man to do the job Udi is your man! No matter if you are facing near deadline deadlock or at the early stages of your development, if you have a problem Udi is the one who will probably be able to solve it, with his large experience at the industry and his widely horizons of thinking , he is always full of just in place great architectural ideas.
I am honored to have Udi as a colleague and a friend (plus having his cell phone on my speed dial).”

Ward Bell Ward Bell, VP Product Development at IdeaBlade
“Everyone will tell you how smart and knowledgable Udi is ... and they are oh-so-right. Let me add that Udi is a smart LISTENER. He's always calibrating what he has to offer with your needs and your experience ... looking for the fit. He has strongly held views ... and the ability to temper them with the nuances of the situation.
I trust Udi to tell me what I need to hear, even if I don't want to hear it, ... in a way that I can hear it. That's a rare skill to go along with his command and intelligence.”

Eli Brin, Program Manager at RISCO Group
“We hired Udi as a SOA specialist for a large scale project. The development is outsourced to India. SOA is a buzzword used almost for anything today. We wanted to understand what SOA really is, and what is the meaning and practice to develop a SOA based system.
We identified Udi as the one that can put some sense and order in our minds. We started with a private customized SOA training for the entire team in Israel. After that I had several focused sessions regarding our architecture and design.
I will summarize it simply (as he is the software simplist): We are very happy to have Udi in our project. It has a great benefit. We feel good and assured with the knowledge and practice he brings. He doesn’t talk over our heads. We assimilated nServicebus as the ESB of the project. I highly recommend you to bring Udi into your project.”

Catherine Hole Catherine Hole, Senior Project Manager at the Norwegian Health Network
“My colleagues and I have spent five interesting days with Udi - diving into the many aspects of SOA. Udi has shown impressive abilities of understanding organizational challenges, and has brought the business perspective into our way of looking at services. He has an excellent understanding of the many layers from business at the top to the technical infrstructure at the bottom. He is a great listener, and manages to simplify challenges in a way that is understandable both for developers and CEOs, and all the specialists in between.”

Yoel Arnon Yoel Arnon, MSMQ Expert
“Udi has a unique, in depth understanding of service oriented architecture and how it should be used in the real world, combined with excellent presentation skills. I think Udi should be a premier choice for a consultant or architect of distributed systems.”

Vadim Mesonzhnik, Development Project Lead at Polycom
“When we were faced with a task of creating a high performance server for a video-tele conferencing domain we decided to opt for a stateless cluster with SQL server approach. In order to confirm our decision we invited Udi.

After carefully listening for 2 hours he said: "With your kind of high availability and performance requirements you don’t want to go with stateless architecture."

One simple sentence saved us from implementing a wrong product and finding that out after years of development. No matter whether our former decisions were confirmed or altered, it gave us great confidence to move forward relying on the experience, industry best-practices and time-proven techniques that Udi shared with us.
It was a distinct pleasure and a unique opportunity to learn from someone who is among the best at what he does.”

Jack Van Hoof Jack Van Hoof, Enterprise Integration Architect at Dutch Railways
“Udi is a respected visionary on SOA and EDA, whose opinion I most of the time (if not always) highly agree with. The nice thing about Udi is that he is able to explain architectural concepts in terms of practical code-level examples.”

Neil Robbins Neil Robbins, Applications Architect at Brit Insurance
“Having followed Udi's blog and other writings for a number of years I attended Udi's two day course on 'Loosely Coupled Messaging with NServiceBus' at SkillsMatter, London.

I would strongly recommend this course to anyone with an interest in how to develop IT systems which provide immediate and future fitness for purpose. An influential and innovative thought leader and practitioner in his field, Udi demonstrates and shares a phenomenally in depth knowledge that proves his position as one of the premier experts in his field globally.

The course has enhanced my knowledge and skills in ways that I am able to immediately apply to provide benefits to my employer. Additionally though I will be able to build upon what I learned in my 2 days with Udi and have no doubt that it will only enhance my future career.

I cannot recommend Udi, and his courses, highly enough.”

Nick Malik Nick Malik, Enterprise Architect at Microsoft Corporation
You are an excellent speaker and trainer, Udi, and I've had the fortunate experience of having attended one of your presentations. I believe that you are a knowledgable and intelligent man.”

Sean Farmar Sean Farmar, Chief Technical Architect at Candidate Manager Ltd
“Udi has provided us with guidance in system architecture and supports our implementation of NServiceBus in our core business application.

He accompanied us in all stages of our development cycle and helped us put vision into real life distributed scalable software. He brought fresh thinking, great in depth of understanding software, and ongoing support that proved as valuable and cost effective.

Udi has the unique ability to analyze the business problem and come up with a simple and elegant solution for the code and the business alike.
With Udi's attention to details, and knowledge we avoided pit falls that would cost us dearly.”

Børge Hansen Børge Hansen, Architect Advisor at Microsoft
“Udi delivered a 5 hour long workshop on SOA for aspiring architects in Norway. While keeping everyone awake and excited Udi gave us some great insights and really delivered on making complex software challenges simple. Truly the software simplist.”

Motty Cohen, SW Manager at KorenTec Technologies
“I know Udi very well from our mutual work at KorenTec. During the analysis and design of a complex, distributed C4I system - where the basic concepts of NServiceBus start to emerge - I gained a lot of "Udi's hours" so I can surely say that he is a professional, skilled architect with fresh ideas and unique perspective for solving complex architecture challenges. His ideas, concepts and parts of the artifacts are the basis of several state-of-the-art C4I systems that I was involved in their architecture design.”

Aaron Jensen Aaron Jensen, VP of Engineering at Eleutian Technology
Awesome. Just awesome.

We’d been meaning to delve into messaging at Eleutian after multiple discussions with and blog posts from Greg Young and Udi Dahan in the past. We weren’t entirely sure where to start, how to start, what tools to use, how to use them, etc. Being able to sit in a room with Udi for an entire week while he described exactly how, why and what he does to tackle a massive enterprise system was invaluable to say the least.

We now have a much better direction and, more importantly, have the confidence we need to start introducing these powerful concepts into production at Eleutian.”

Gad Rosenthal Gad Rosenthal, Department Manager at Retalix
“A thinking person. Brought fresh and valuable ideas that helped us in architecting our product. When recommending a solution he supports it with evidence and detail so you can successfully act based on it. Udi's support "comes on all levels" - As the solution architect through to the detailed class design. Trustworthy!”

Chris Bilson Chris Bilson, Developer at Russell Investment Group
“I had the pleasure of attending a workshop Udi led at the Seattle ALT.NET conference in February 2009. I have been reading Udi's articles and listening to his podcasts for a long time and have always looked to him as a source of advice on software architecture.
When I actually met him and talked to him I was even more impressed. Not only is Udi an extremely likable person, he's got that rare gift of being able to explain complex concepts and ideas in a way that is easy to understand.
All the attendees of the workshop greatly appreciate the time he spent with us and the amazing insights into service oriented architecture he shared with us.”

Alexey Shestialtynov Alexey Shestialtynov, Senior .Net Developer at Candidate Manager
“I met Udi at Candidate Manager where he was brought in part-time as a consultant to help the company make its flagship product more scalable. For me, even after 30 years in software development, working with Udi was a great learning experience. I simply love his fresh ideas and architecture insights.
As we all know it is not enough to be armed with best tools and technologies to be successful in software - there is still human factor involved. When, as it happens, the project got in trouble, management asked Udi to step into a leadership role and bring it back on track. This he did in the span of a month. I can only wish that things had been done this way from the very beginning.
I look forward to working with Udi again in the future.”

Christopher Bennage Christopher Bennage, President at Blue Spire Consulting, Inc.
“My company was hired to be the primary development team for a large scale and highly distributed application. Since these are not necessarily everyday requirements, we wanted to bring in some additional expertise. We chose Udi because of his blogging, podcasting, and speaking. We asked him to to review our architectural strategy as well as the overall viability of project.
I was very impressed, as Udi demonstrated a broad understanding of the sorts of problems we would face. His advice was honest and unbiased and very pragmatic. Whenever I questioned him on particular points, he was able to backup his opinion with real life examples. I was also impressed with his clarity and precision. He was very careful to untangle the meaning of words that might be overloaded or otherwise confusing. While Udi's hourly rate may not be the cheapest, the ROI is undoubtedly a deal. I would highly recommend consulting with Udi.”

Robert Lewkovich, Product / Development Manager at Eggs Overnight
“Udi's advice and consulting were a huge time saver for the project I'm responsible for. The $ spent were well worth it and provided me with a more complete understanding of nServiceBus and most importantly in helping make the correct architectural decisions earlier thereby reducing later, and more expensive, rework.”

Ray Houston Ray Houston, Director of Development at TOPAZ Technologies
“Udi's SOA class made me smart - it was awesome.

The class was very well put together. The materials were clear and concise and Udi did a fantastic job presenting it. It was a good mixture of lecture, coding, and question and answer. I fully expected that I would be taking notes like crazy, but it was so well laid out that the only thing I wrote down the entire course was what I wanted for lunch. Udi provided us with all the lecture materials and everyone has access to all of the samples which are in the nServiceBus trunk.

Now I know why Udi is the "Software Simplist." I was amazed to find that all the code and solutions were indeed very simple. The patterns that Udi presented keep things simple by isolating complexity so that it doesn't creep into your day to day code. The domain code looks the same if it's running in a single process or if it's running in 100 processes.”

Ian Cooper Ian Cooper, Team Lead at Beazley
“Udi is one of the leaders in the .Net development community, one of the truly smart guys who do not just get best architectural practice well enough to educate others but drives innovation. Udi consistently challenges my thinking in ways that make me better at what I do.”

Liron Levy, Team Leader at Rafael
“I've met Udi when I worked as a team leader in Rafael. One of the most senior managers there knew Udi because he was doing superb architecture job in another Rafael project and he recommended bringing him on board to help the project I was leading.
Udi brought with him fresh solutions and invaluable deep architecture insights. He is an authority on SOA (service oriented architecture) and this was a tremendous help in our project.
On the personal level - Udi is a great communicator and can persuade even the most difficult audiences (I was part of such an audience myself..) by bringing sound explanations that draw on his extensive knowledge in the software business. Working with Udi was a great learning experience for me, and I'll be happy to work with him again in the future.”

Adam Dymitruk Adam Dymitruk, Director of IT at Apara Systems
“I met Udi for the first time at DevTeach in Montreal back in early 2007. While Udi is usually involved in SOA subjects, his knowledge spans all of a software development company's concerns. I would not hesitate to recommend Udi for any company that needs excellent leadership, mentoring, problem solving, application of patterns, implementation of methodologies and straight out solution development.
There are very few people in the world that are as dedicated to their craft as Udi is to his. At ALT.NET Seattle, Udi explained many core ideas about SOA. The team that I brought with me found his workshop and other talks the highlight of the event and provided the most value to us and our organization. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to recommend him.”

Eytan Michaeli Eytan Michaeli, CTO Korentec
“Udi was responsible for a major project in the company, and as a chief architect designed a complex multi server C4I system with many innovations and excellent performance.”


Carl Kenne Carl Kenne, .Net Consultant at Dotway AB
“Udi's session "DDD in Enterprise apps" was truly an eye opener. Udi has a great ability to explain complex enterprise designs in a very comprehensive and inspiring way. I've seen several sessions on both DDD and SOA in the past, but Udi puts it in a completly new perspective and makes us understand what it's all really about. If you ever have a chance to see any of Udi's sessions in the future, take it!”

Avi Nehama, R&D Project Manager at Retalix
“Not only that Udi is a briliant software architecture consultant, he also has remarkable abilities to present complex ideas in a simple and concise manner, and...
always with a smile. Udi is indeed a top-league professional!”

Ben Scheirman Ben Scheirman, Lead Developer at CenterPoint Energy
“Udi is one of those rare people who not only deeply understands SOA and domain driven design, but also eloquently conveys that in an easy to grasp way. He is patient, polite, and easy to talk to. I'm extremely glad I came to his workshop on SOA.”

Scott C. Reynolds Scott C. Reynolds, Director of Software Engineering at CBLPath
“Udi is consistently advancing the state of thought in software architecture, service orientation, and domain modeling.
His mastery of the technologies and techniques is second to none, but he pairs that with a singular ability to listen and communicate effectively with all parties, technical and non, to help people arrive at context-appropriate solutions. Every time I have worked with Udi, or attended a talk of his, or just had a conversation with him I have come away from it enriched with new understanding about the ideas discussed.”

Evgeny-Hen Osipow, Head of R&D at PCLine
“Udi has helped PCLine on projects by implementing architectural blueprints demonstrating the value of simple design and code.”

Rhys Campbell Rhys Campbell, Owner at Artemis West
“For many years I have been following the works of Udi. His explanation of often complex design and architectural concepts are so cleanly broken down that even the most junior of architects can begin to understand these concepts. These concepts however tend to typify the "real world" problems we face daily so even the most experienced software expert will find himself in an "Aha!" moment when following Udi teachings.
It was a pleasure to finally meet Udi in Seattle Alt.Net OpenSpaces 2008, where I was pleasantly surprised at how down-to-earth and approachable he was. His depth and breadth of software knowledge also became apparent when discussion with his peers quickly dove deep in to the problems we current face. If given the opportunity to work with or recommend Udi I would quickly take that chance. When I think .Net Architecture, I think Udi.”

Sverre Hundeide Sverre Hundeide, Senior Consultant at Objectware
“Udi had been hired to present the third LEAP master class in Oslo. He is an well known international expert on enterprise software architecture and design, and is the author of the open source messaging framework nServiceBus. The entire class was based on discussion and interaction with the audience, and the only Power Point slide used was the one showing the agenda.
He started out with sketching a naive traditional n-tier application (big ball of mud), and based on suggestions from the audience we explored different solutions which might improve the solution. Whatever suggestions we threw at him, he always had a thoroughly considered answer describing pros and cons with the suggested solution. He obviously has a lot of experience with real world enterprise SOA applications.”

Raphaël Wouters Raphaël Wouters, Owner/Managing Partner at Medinternals
“I attended Udi's excellent course 'Advanced Distributed System Design with SOA and DDD' at Skillsmatter. Few people can truly claim such a high skill and expertise level, present it using a pragmatic, concrete no-nonsense approach and still stay reachable.”

Nimrod Peleg Nimrod Peleg, Lab Engineer at Technion IIT
“One of the best programmers and software engineer I've ever met, creative, knows how to design and implemet, very collaborative and finally - the applications he designed implemeted work for many years without any problems!

Jose Manuel Beas
“When I attended Udi's SOA Workshop, then it suddenly changed my view of what Service Oriented Architectures were all about. Udi explained complex concepts very clearly and created a very productive discussion environment where all the attendees could learn a lot. I strongly recommend hiring Udi.”

Daniel Jin Daniel Jin, Senior Lead Developer at PJM Interconnection
“Udi is one of the top SOA guru in the .NET space. He is always eager to help others by sharing his knowledge and experiences. His blog articles often offer deep insights and is a invaluable resource. I highly recommend him.”

Pasi Taive Pasi Taive, Chief Architect at Tieto
“I attended both of Udi's "UI Composition Key to SOA Success" and "DDD in Enterprise Apps" sessions and they were exceptionally good. I will definitely participate in his sessions again. Udi is a great presenter and has the ability to explain complex issues in a manner that everyone understands.”

Eran Sagi, Software Architect at HP
“So far, I heard about Service Oriented architecture all over. Everyone mentions it – the big buzz word. But, when I actually asked someone for what does it really mean, no one managed to give me a complete satisfied answer. Finally in his excellent course “Advanced Distributed Systems”, I got the answers I was looking for. Udi went over the different motivations (principles) of Services Oriented, explained them well one by one, and showed how each one could be technically addressed using NService bus. In his course, Udi also explain the way of thinking when coming to design a Service Oriented system. What are the questions you need to ask yourself in order to shape your system, place the logic in the right places for best Service Oriented system.

I would recommend this course for any architect or developer who deals with distributed system, but not only. In my work we do not have a real distributed system, but one PC which host both the UI application and the different services inside, all communicating via WCF. I found that many of the architecture principles and motivations of SOA apply for our system as well. Enough that you have SW partitioned into components and most of the principles becomes relevant to you as well. Bottom line – an excellent course recommended to any SW Architect, or any developer dealing with distributed system.”

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