Andreas Ohlund’s talk on New and Shiny things in NServiceBus 3.0 is available here.

By the way, we’ve now got a beta out of NServiceBus 3.0 – get it here.

Yves Goeleven will be giving a talk on simplifying distributed application development with NServiceBus and the Windows Azure Platform on Jan 31 – details here.

Carl and Richard over at Dot Net Rocks interviewed me at the Oredev conference in Sweden about Domain Driven Design and one of my pet peeves – the use of Customer in example applications. Get it here.

I’m also happy to announce that registration for my 5-day Advanced Distributed Systems Design course has now opened for Bad Ems Germany and New York, in addition to the already open registrations for Austin TX and London. Information and registration on my training page.

I’ve also made some progress with the recording of the course – you can now access days 1, 2, and part of day 3 – covering distributed systems theory, coupling, messaging patterns, bus and broker architectural style, SOA building blocks, and the hotel management SOA exercise. Information and purchase available here.

I know some of you wanted to register to my course in San Francisco this October only to see it sell out. There have been a couple of cancellations so there are now some seats available – get ‘em here.

Just as a reminder, when in San Francisco I’ll be giving a presentation to the Bay.NET user group on the evening of Wednesday Oct 26, at 6:30pm. Info and registration here.

In November I’m going to be in Madrid with Eric Evans at the IASA DDD conference, me giving a keynote on CQRS following with a full-day CQRS workshop. After that I’m off to Oredev presenting on CQRS, domain models, and bounded contexts.

Hope to see you at one of these places.

Info and registration here.

Hope to see you there.

NServiceBus on DNR-TV

For some more advanced stuff, I suggest looking at the Hidden NServiceBus Gems talk that I gave at Skills Matter the week after. Here we get into all sorts of things that you won’t tend to find by yourself through regular usage of NServiceBus.

Hidden NServiceBus Gems

Enjoy.

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be giving my 5-day course in Aarhus Denmark on September 19th. This is in addition to June 13 in London; July 4 in Sydney; and August 15 in Oslo.

I’ll be coming back to the US on Oct 10 to give the course in the San Francisco area, but don’t have a venue yet. Contact me if you can recommend a good location.

Also, Andreas will be teaching my 3-day NServiceBus course in London on June 1st with Skills Matter – you can register here. He’s also giving an “in the brain” user-group presentation on June 2nd on reliable integrations with NServiceBus.

I also forgot to mention that Adam Fyles created some awesome Visual Studio templates to speed your use of NServiceBus – get them here.

We were the lucky ones.

We loved tech – a lot of us from a very early age. And then we found out (sooner or later) that we could get a job in tech. We could do what we loved and get paid for it (and paid pretty darn well). We were living the dream.

Not only that, we had a pretty good system in place – career advancement, changing the world with the tech we created, and sometimes even getting rich in the process (with the IT version of the lottery called “the startup”).

But something happened over the years – imperceptibly creeping up on us, until one day we noticed.

It was as if we’d woken up from the dream. Something was missing.

Just like in “The Matrix”

“That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
- Morpheus

There’s the You when you go to work.
There’s the You when you go home to your family.
There’s the You when you’re out with your friends.

Like a closet of invisible suits you put on, and take off to suit the occasion.

You know that none of those Yous are really you, but on the other hand, have you ever stopped to think who you are underneath it all?

I know I didn’t – not for a long time.

Hold that thought – we’ll get back to it.

What does the at-work You want?

Beyond the providing food/shelter bottom of the Maslow pyramid (which is pretty much handled by default for anybody in IT) for you and your family, I’m guessing you want the project you’re working on to be successful. Everybody does.

But why is that?

Well, if the project is successful, that means that *you* were successful, and you will be recognized by your colleagues for that success – social status, more power/money (which is really just another kind of social status), etc.

The same is true for those of us who run our own business – just instead of colleagues, it’s more about customers, and products instead of projects. I *suspect* the same might be true of stay-at-home parents – replace colleagues for friends/family/neighborhood and products with home/children. My wife is a stay-at-home parent so my observations in this area are first-hand. We’ll talk some more about the at-home You in a bit.

Of course, it is not socially acceptable to admit that all we really want is recognition/social status. There’s a whole counter-cycle at play. We are afraid of being labeled as hungry for recognition:

Self-centered.

The kind of person that is “not a team player”. We would have our career advancement cut short, ultimately losing all possibility for getting any recognition. We’d be ostracized by society – a terrifying thought to our “lizard brain”.

Evolution has bred into us the need for social safety – don’t rock the boat; fit in; either be “one of us” or you’ll be eaten by a lion.

Nobody ever talks about it, but it looks like the culture we live in has slowly and gently infected us with a virus. This cultural system will pit our psyche against itself – striving for recognition and at the same time hating ourselves for it. The unconscious mind causing us to behave in ways which undermine the success we so want to achieve.

The individualistic theme found in our culture doesn’t seem to have changed any of it – or it might just be the perfect disguise. I don’t think I could come up with a more effective way of controlling masses of highly intelligent people if I spent my whole life trying.

But you aren’t the You who goes to work – maybe it’s that You who is trapped, but not the real you.

You and You and you

Out of the struggles of moving in with a significant other, marriage, building a family, you created an at-home You.

I don’t want to go into too much depth here, but suffice it to say that beyond the basic evolutionary need to have your progeny survive, the social aspects come into play again. For example, you want your kids to get a good education… so that one day they can have their own successful at-work Them.

But also, you want your kids to be happy – that’s you, not your at-home You.

You probably would also like your extended family and friends to be happy too. Come to think of it, you want everyone to be happy, don’t you?

Let’s talk some more about being happy.

Seeing as none of the other Yous are you - how much of your life is spent as you?

Of all the things you’ve striven for in your life, how many were really for you, rather than for any of the other Yous?

Now think carefully – is there anything that you need that you don’t already have?

When you have a moment of true happiness, that is you, not any one of the other Yous – isn’t it?

There are other moments when you are you.

When courage is needed – whether that’s asking somebody out on a date, having an honest conversation with your spouse about an important or painful topic, standing up to your boss, whatever – you are the source of that courage, not any of the other Yous.

Maybe that’s why courage is often so hard – you don’t have much experience being you.

Wrapping up

What would happen if you consciously spent more time being you?

It might be scary to start being you in any kind of social context, so how about if you started when you were alone? Instead of distracting yourself with TV, facebook, etc – maybe it’s time we all got to know ourselves a bit better. Sometimes you are you when doing your hobby (I like running) – but anything that can bring you to that quiet contemplative space should work.

Maybe you’d also be less judging of others, as they’re not themselves around you.

How do you think others would react, how would they *be* around you, if you were you?

Imagine the cascading effects of it all.

Start now.

Nice to finally meet you.

This will actually be part 2 of his previous presentation – you can find the recording of part 1 here.

This time Andreas will be showing publish/subscribe communication as well as the use of sagas – get the full details here.

I also was on the famous Dot Net Rocks again, this time talking about CQRS. You can find that here.

If you want to understand these topics in depth, the best recommendation I can give you is to come to one of my courses. It isn’t possible to explain the relationships between SOA, CQRS, DDD, messaging, layering, etc in an hour presentation or a series of blog posts.

The next course is in New York City in April and is almost sold out – get one of the last 3 seats here.

I’ve also opened registration for the course in Sydney for July; even though I’ve secured a bigger venue, seats are already going quickly. Please don’t wait too long to register – details here.

Hands-on

The NServiceBus course is actually different from what I previously delivered – the course has been extended from 2 days to 3 days and now has a much larger hands-on component for attendees.

The idea is that team leads and architects will likely be going to the 5-day distributed systems course, and then that the members of their teams go to this one. This 3-day course will have enough theory that attendees will know what the terms AC, BC, and Service mean, but the main focus will be on the concrete implementation of these concepts using NServiceBus – the actual building of reliable and scalable systems.

The next delivery planned for this course will be in London on Nov 8-10 – register here.

Upcoming Advanced Distributed Systems Design

Oct 11-15: Johannesburg, South Africa

Oct 24-28: Israel

Nov 1-5: London, UK

Nov 22-26: Sydney, Australia

Dec 13-17: Seattle WA, USA

Information on the Advanced Distributed Systems Design course can be found here.

Upcoming conferences

Oct 19-20: Prio Conference – Nurnberg, Germany

I’m also giving a post-conference workshop on NServiceBus – details here.

YOW Australia – Melbourne, Dec 2-3

* I have one free day of consulting left between my course and the conference – if you’re interested, and the beginning of December in Sydney or Melbourne works for you, contact me at consult@udidahan.com

Currently, the video is being graciously hosted by Jon Torresdal on his blog, so let’s hope that the bandwidth holds up.

Get it here.

The recording of the talk is online here.

There is one important thing that I didn’t have enough time to cover, but I want you to keep in mind as you’re watching this. It is that CQRS is applicable only *within* the context of a single service/BC – NOT across or between them.

Let me know what you think.

Click here for the full list of topics and to download the podcast.

Let me know what you think or any questions you may have in the comments.

Take a listen.

Those of you following me on twitter (here) have an inkling that it has to do with the connection between user interfaces and services – but that’ll have to wait. Don’t want to steal my own thunder.

A nice meaty blog post on the topic is coming.

Definitely worth checking out.

For those of you who might be interested in hearing a bit more of my back-story, how I got into architecture, etc – you can find all that out in the current issue of the Microsoft Architecture Journal. Here’s a quick sneak-peek:

Q: It’s sometimes frustrating when you try to keep updated on latest technologies and trends but after investing the effort on experiencing yourself (coding, watching webcasts, testing demos, etc), there’s a lot more of new technologies in the pipeline (just look back to the last PDC). Do you have any recipe to efficiently deal with such avalanche?

A: There is indeed a continuous flood of information coming at developers today. Never has so much information been so readily available and accessible to so many. It turns out, though, that much of that information is about how something works, less about what problem it is intended to solve, and much less about which problems it isn’t suited for. As an architect looking at choosing the right tool for the right job, I focus a lot more on the last two. Often, I go digging to find out why a tool isn’t a good fit for a job. So, I guess my recipe is to mostly ignore the avalanche and tap my network to find out the stuff the avalanche won’t tell you.

Read on…

The quantity of deep, insightful questions was impressive and I hope that everybody got their most pressing issues addressed. I know that by the time you got home you probably had a whole bunch more – that happens all the time. This SOA/EDA style often gives a whole new perspective on system design.

You can find the slides online here.

Anyway, please feel free to send me your questions and I’ll do my best to answer them here.

When Ohad gets the recording online, I’ll make sure to link to it for those of you who couldn’t make it.

Feedback from attendees

From Ohad’s blog: “The talk was awesome … Udi really made our second usergroup meeting a huge success !”

Rotem Bloom: “היה פשוט הרצאה פצצה מי שלא מגיע מפסיד”, translated, “The presentation was ‘da bomb’, if you weren’t there, you missed out”

Adlai Maschiach: “הרצאה נ-ה-ד-ר-ת !”, translated, “A W-O-N-D-E-R-F-U-L presentation!”

Yitzhak Gootvilig: “הרצאה מעולה. מומלץ למצוא את הדרך להאזין להקלטה “, translated, “Excellent presentation. I strongly suggest finding a way to listen to the recording”

Since there’s quite a lot of content already posted, and it not being terribly easy to navigate, in my coming blog posts I will be trying to point to those older posts so that my newer readers have an easier time finding their way around. I also want to thank my existing subscribers for their patience through this all.

If you do have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them. I don’t think I’ve left a single posted question unanswered over the past 5 or so years of blogging, so it really is a good way to get my attention (now that the blog spam finally seems under control).

Good having you here.

While I usually take the Groucho Marx approach about groups that would have me as a member, this is different.

With members including Scott Ambler, James Bach, Kent Beck, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Tom DeMarco, Jim Highsmith, Ron Jeffries, Tim Lister, Michael Rosen, Johanna Rothman, and Ed Yourdon (to name not so few), I am honoured to be welcomed as a peer.

I’ve written an Executive Update as a part of the Enterprise Architecture Advisory Service available to Cutter clients which can be found here:

The Logging Service: Fallacy or Feature?