Now Available: The ThoughtWorks Anthology

The ThoughtWorks Anthology, available from the Pragmatic Programmers, is a collection of essays covering a wide range of issues facing individuals and organisations doing software development today. The book has pragmatic advice to improve the effectiveness of efforts across the software development life-cycle. You'll find essays on testing, managing a project, the creation of domain specific languages, issues of build and deploy, programming languages, techniques for software development, and more.

On The Line: Interviews with Contributors to The ThoughtWorks Anthology

Contributors to the book live and work in all parts of the world. Over the coming weeks, we'll telephone our authors--getting them "On the Line"--to talk about their work. For our first interview, ThoughtWorks' CTO Rebecca Parsons talks about the origins of the Anthology and what you, as a reader, can expect.

Thought Leadership at ThoughtWorks

by Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist

Photograph by Obie Fernandez

Compared to most global IT services firms we are tiny, but we make up for it in being loud. Our goal is not just to help our clients build the best software systems to help them in their business, but also to improve the entire profession of software development. As a result we don't keep our ideas to ourselves, we actively try to pass on what we've learned. We believe that we gain by doing this just as much as we believe it's the right thing to do.

We are proud to have several authors as ThoughtWorkers, some joined us with books already published, others published their first book while working at ThoughtWorks. The commitment in time (particularly when working full time with clients) and dedication required to write a book can only be underestimated. The reward of a text that provides long-lasting information to the profession makes it worthwhile.

Books represent one of the deepest efforts at passing on our knowledge, but we also see many ThoughtWorkers contributing through shorter articles and research papers, both in print and on the web. Speaking of the web, we also have an active group of bloggers who daily add thoughts to our consolidated feed. As you might expect from a free and open organisation like ours, the variety of material we talk about in our blogs sometimes verges on scary.

As well as writing we also speak. We've played an active role in speaking at, sponsoring, and even organizing various conferences. We've been glad in recent years to find more and more conference organizers coming to us looking for speakers, knowing they will get high quality talks with no corporate sales pitch. We like to tell things how we see them. With such a variety of ideas in house this does lead to ThoughtWorkers disagreeing in public. Some companies see this as something to avoid, we see it as a sign of our health and openness.

Writing and speaking are traditionally seen as the public face of a company. For software companies there is another vital channel -- software itself. We have always been both enthusiastic users and contributors to Open Source software. Many ThoughtWorkers spend nights and weekends working on open source projects, which we encourage as much as we can (even letting them work on them in the daytime occasionally). Open source projects are hardly ever controlled by a single company, so there's little notion of "ThoughtWorks open source". Yet we're glad that our individual contributors have made a big difference by their work on these projects.

People in our profession with a high public profile aren't short of opportunities to earn their crust. What keeps us here at ThoughtWorks is the chance to regularly interact with lots of bright minds. Even here, most people aren't involved in speaking, writing, and open-source programming. Yet every day they generate ideas and act as a sounding board that greatly enhances those of us that do. It's that ecosystem that makes ThoughtWorks such a rewarding home.

View our recent books, articles and research papers.

Photography - Martin Fowler speaks at QCon
by Obie Fernandez

Print this page