Restarting my blog
I haven’t been blogging for over 2,5 years (except for one off topic post). This was partly because I didn’t bother, but the main reason was that I didn’t have a goal, a story I wanted to tell the world. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff around integration and SOA/BPM, ranging from guiding BizTalk development to developing an enterprise integration strategy.
2008 to me was the year I dived into the theory of architecting and architecture on one side and understanding the core foundations of Service Orientation and Business Process Management on the other side.
On the theory of architecting I was greatly inspired by the work done by the Software Engineering Institute. I dived into Software Architecture in Practice (2nd Edition) and was lucky to receive an eight-day training from the writers through Logica, my employer.
On SOA I was greatly inspired by the work done by Thomas Erl.
These sources gave me a lot of background on the complex, and still evolving, playground of the Integration Architect.
For 2009, I’ll take up the next challenge, bringing all this theory into practice. Now, I do think that I already bring a lot of the theory in practice. In my day to day job, I work in an environment where the integration we do is greatly driven (and constrained) by existing systems, but with a vision of having a Service Oriented environment in the long run.
In the past year I’ve learned a lot on what the real key features of integration architectures are and what kind of decisions are important to make steps toward Service Orientation.
My goal for this blog is sharing my view on these topics with the world, sparking some discussion. I already have some stuff to talk about, so I guess in the short run I will sound like a teacher telling his story, In the long run I see this blog more as the diary of a tourist touring an environment that is only roughly explored and documented.
As a side note, I don’t write today as a result of some new year blues with big new intentions. It’s more the holiday season with a lot of days off that allowed me to think about what I want to achieve. But still it is a good day to restart a blog ;-).