About the Authors

Neal Ford is director, software architect, and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a software company and a community of passionate, purpose-led individuals who think disruptively to deliver technology to address the toughest challenges, all while seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social change. 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 an internationally recognized expert on software development and delivery, especially at the intersection of agile engineering techniques and software architecture. Neal has authored magazine articles, nine books (and counting), and dozens of video presentations and has spoken at hundreds of developer conferences worldwide. The topics of these works include software architecture, Continuous Delivery, functional programming, and cutting-edge software innovations, as well as a business-focused book and video on improving technical presentations. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his website at nealford.com.

Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks’ chief technology officer with decades-long applications development experience across a range of industries and systems. Her technical experience includes leading the creation of large-scale distributed object applications, the integration of disparate systems, and working with architecture teams. Separate from her passion for deep technology, Dr. Parsons is a strong advocate for diversity in the technology industry.

Before joining ThoughtWorks, Dr. Parsons worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida where she taught courses in compilers, program optimization, distributed computation, programming languages, theory of computation, machine learning, and computational biology. She also worked as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology, and nonlinear dynamical systems.

Dr. Parsons received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and economics from Bradley University, a Master of Science in computer science from Rice University, and her PhD in computer science from Rice University. She is also the coauthor of Domain-Specific Languages, The ThoughtWorks Anthology, and Building Evolutionary Architectures, 1st edition.

Patrick Kua is an independent CTO coach, former CTO of N26, and former principal technical consultant at ThoughtWorks, having worked in the technology industry for over 20 years. His personal mission is to accelerate the growth of technical leaders, and he does that through one-on-one coaching, online and in-person technical leadership workshops, and his popular newsletter for leaders in tech, Level Up.

He is the author of The Retrospective Handbook: A Guide for Agile Teams and Talking with Tech Leads: From Novices to Practitioners and offers training via the The Tech Lead Academy.

You can discover more about him at his website, patkua.com, or reach out to him on twitter at @patkua.

Pramod Sadalage is director of Data & DevOps at ThoughtWorks, where he enjoys the rare role of bridging the divide between database professionals and application developers. He is usually sent to clients with particularly challenging data needs that require new technologies and techniques. In the early 2000s he developed techniques to allow relational databases to be designed in an evolutionary manner based on version-controlled schema migrations.

He is coauthor of Software Architecture: The Hard Parts, coauthor of Refactoring Databases, coauthor of NoSQL Distilled, and author of Recipes for Continuous Database Integration, and he continues to speak and write about the insights he and his clients learn.