Interview with James Urquhart

Software Crafts Podcast

In this episode, we host James Urquhart. James is challenged with the heuristic “Use of standard interfaces and protocols for event-driven integration”, based on his recent work. We discuss the changes in the behaviour of teams creating software when they embrace an event-driven integration, together with leveraging engineering practices like continuous delivery.

James also shares his experiences with value streams and the impacts on software architecture. By using event-driven integration and flow architectures to unlock the value within organisations and also between organisations. He predicts that the next decade will be very dynamic in this space, and technology and cost of ownership can be potential roadblocks.

James recommends:

• Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies from Geoffrey West
• Open resources as Kafka, Apache Flink and Swin.AI
• Flow Architectures from James Urquhart
• Wardley Maps
• Promise Theory

James Urquhart is a Strategic Executive Advisor for VMware Tanzu customers. James brings almost 30 years of experience in distributed applications development, deployment, and operations, focusing on software as a complex adaptive system, cloud-native applications and platforms, and automation. Prior to joining VMware, via Pivotal, James ran product and engineering teams for AWS, SOASTA, and Dell (via Enstratius). James has also written and spoken extensively about software agility and the business opportunities it affords.

James was named one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing by both the MIT Technology Review and the Huffington Post and is a former contributing author to GigaOm and CNET. He recently completed a book on event-driven integration for O'Reilly Publishing titled "Flow Architectures: The Future of Event-Driven Integration".

James graduated from Macalester College with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Physics.