I had a fun year in 2015. I took on some new responsibilities at work, moved my family up to Washington State, spoke at a few conferences, received another Microsoft MVP award, took on a “lead editor” role at InfoQ.com, and delivered Pluralsight courses on Cloud Foundry and AWS Databases. And, I’ve continued to blog for over 10 years now with no interruptions. Thanks to the 130,000 of you who stopped by in 2015. I’ve enjoyed taking this journey with you.

As I’ve done for the last few years, I thought I’d recap some of the best books that I read this year, and the things that I enjoyed writing the most.

Favorite Blog Posts and Articles

I kept up a decent writing pace this year, and here were some of my favorites.

• [Forbes] 5 Things to Consider In Your Cloud Transition. How can you make your cloud transition easier? I throw 5 tips your way.
• [Forbes] 4 Tips For A Successful Hybrid Union. Anytime you can make a strained analogy between marriage and hybrid clouds, you gotta do it!
• [My Blog] What are all of Microsoft Azure’s Application Integration Services. It was fun to stop and take a look at where Microsoft’s at with their integration portfolio.
• [My Blog] You don’t need a private cloud, you need isolation options (and maybe more control!). This post was popular and I’m glad to have slightly impacted the conversation about how companies should approach their cloud options.
• [My Blog] Comparing Clouds: API Capabilities. This post finished up my long-running series of posts that looked at multiple cloud providers.
• [My Blog] 6 reasons why working at the office is much better than working remote. I went from being a remote employee to an in-office one, and counter to conventional wisdom, I think it was a good thing.
• [My Blog] Docker Q&A for Windows users. Unless you’ve been unconscious for the past 18 months, you know about Docker. It was fun writing this up.
• [CenturyLink Blog] From Application Services to Bare Metal: A Complete Platform for a Complex World. I’m proud of the work we’ve done at CenturyLink, and this was my blog post introducing our capabilities that run from Bare Metal servers all the way up to a PaaS.
• [InfoQ] Virtual Roundtable: The Role of Containers in Modern Applications. Spawned from a Twitter chat, this InfoQ roundtable featured some smart people and explored some new ground.
• [InfoQ] The Cloud Migration Checklist. I wrote this up as part of an article series, and think it covered some new focus areas for those looking at doing a cloud migration.
• [InfoQ] Heroku Adds Private Spaces for Isolating Cloud Apps. This helped inspire my “isolation options” blog post above, and I’ve continually been impressed with Heroku’s thought leadership in platforms.
• [InfoQ] Pivotal Cloud Foundry Adds Netflix OSS Services, Docker Support. I try to write at InfoQ at least once a month, and when I do, I try to be very thorough. This was a fun post that gave me a chance to interview a smart fella.

Favorite Books

Plowed through twenty four books in 2015, and many of them were focused on either strategy/leadership, or history. Of course, many of the history books are also lessons in leadership!

• Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization. I read this after seeing how much it influenced my colleague Jim Newkirk. This is a heavily-researched book that explains how people form “tribes” in all walks of life, and we can categorize (and improve) the performance of a tribe. The authors encourage the reader to use various leverage points to positively adjust language and relationships in a tribe. Any tribe has a dominant culture, and after reading this book, you can easily identify what stage you are at. Stage 1, where life sucks? Stage 2, where my life sucks? Stage 3, where I’m great, but you’re not? Stage 4, where we’re great, and they’re not? Or Stage 5, life is great? This matters, because the authors use data to demonstrate that tribes at higher stages will outperform tribes at lesser stages. This is a great book, easy read, and will likely alter your approach.
• Starship Troopers. The 1997 movie is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I had heard the book was much less ridiculous. Indeed, the book has a good plot, and has some insightful discussion about duty, allegiance, and leadership. And bugs. Really big bugs.
• Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. This true story was freakin’ insane and I finished the book in two days. It’s the story of Ernest Shackleton and his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Their planned itinerary was cut short when their ship got stuck in the ice, and from then on, they team faced an unbelievable set of obstacles as they fought for survival in one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth. Phenomenal tale of sacrifice and a refusal to succumb to impossible odds. I would have lasted barely a day under these conditions.
• Barbarians to Bureaucrats: Corporate Lifecycle Strategies. My former boss Jared Wray recommended this book. It goes through the leadership stages in the corporate lifecycle, and identifies characteristics of each stage, the challenges you face, and how to work with leaders in that mode. These stages – prophet, barbarian, builder and explorer, administrator, bureaucrat, and aristocrat – are well explained, and the authors describes how a “synergist” leader can move between stages as the company needs it. Read it, identify where you’re at, and if you’re working at a place functioning in the last couple stages, start looking for work elsewhere!
• Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It … and Why the Rest Don’t. The author identifies three barriers you face when scaling small enterprises to large ones: leadership, scalable infrastructure, and market dynamics. The book includes plenty of techniques for helping companies find the right questions to answer, establish routines, retain great employees, set a strategy, and deal with the inevitable challenges that you face when growing a business. Whether you’re an individual contributor, team leader, senior manager, or executive, there’s something here to help you see things differently and avoid the mistakes that many companies make.
• Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson’s Battle of Trafalgar. I seemed to read a lot of “leadership under duress” books this year. Don’t read into that. This book does a wonderful job painting a picture of 19th century Europe, and one of the most significant military victories of that period. Nelson demonstrated many of the leadership characteristics that we value today: authenticity, conviction, creativity, an intense desire to win, and unwavering focus even in the face of brutal conditions. We may get uncomfortable nowadays when (business) leaders unabashedly commit to destroying the enemy, but this book shows the value of strong leaders committed to a cause.
• American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company. The book almost made me want to go buy a Ford, and that’s saying something! If you think you work somewhere with a toxic culture, it’s probably not as bad as Ford was. Mulally went from turning around Boeing, to taking on the assignment of “fixing” Ford in a challenging economic climate. His tale is inspiring, in part, because it’s not impossible to follow his blueprint. Mulally came in and simplified the product portfolio, dramatically improved internal transparency, demanded accountability, encouraged collaboration, and established a data-driven mindset, all while maintaining an optimistic outlook devoid of pretense. You’ll find lots of techniques to introduce in your own organization, while seeing a firsthand account of steady leadership when the situation seems hopeless. Great book.
• The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation. Fascinating, extremely detailed account of the origins of Christianity and how the religion spread through the Middle East and Europe. Impressively researched, very readable, but a tad dry at times. Still, a very interesting read.
• The Martian: A Novel. Another book that I read over a weekend. Couldn’t put it down. It was released in 2011 and a movie based on the book was released in 2015. While some lamented the thin backstory on the hero, I found the overall story compelling and the supporting scientific details added to the realism. Good plot twists, constant sense of danger. It’s the story of my life.
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Military bodies are often a source of team and strategy innovation, and this book by General Stanley McChrystal explains how the US military needed to fundamentally transform itself to battle the tactics of al-Qaeda. Specifically, he explains how one must stop this obsession with efficiency and also factor in adaptability. This is an excellent book on organization design and the move away from top-down command and control structures, and towards empowered teams that can rapidly adjust course. Great discussion of resilience thinking, cooperation, rapid decision making, driving change even when it makes others uncomfortable, and (physically) breaking down silos.
• Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy. Insightful book by Jeff Sussna that asks the reader to re-think their approach to service design and delivery. It’s a great introduction to ideas like promise theory, cybernetics, and continuous design. Sussna explains the new role of IT, and spends considerable time describing how Quality Assurance teams should change their approach. This is an important book that outlines many key principles for companies that want to maintain relevance in the years ahead.
• Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. Another great book about teams, difficult circumstances, and leadership based on hard decisions. It’s a compelling, well-written true story that creates a real emotional attachment to the characters. Great example of teams that felt accountable to each other, not their superiors, and how hard-earned trust enabled them to survive WW II together.
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Entrepreneur extraordinaire Steve Blank wrote this book in 2005. It remains a very relevant guide that outlines “the repeatable path to success” for startups. He claims that those who “win” do so because of an obsession with customer learning and discovery. Blank tells the reader to ignore the classic product development model, and instead focus on a deep understanding of customers and their “jobs to be done.” In this easy to read book, Blank includes lots of real-world examples, challenges conventional wisdom, and provides a handful of tools for assessing what kind of startup you’ve got. This book is relevant for those building products within existing organizations, not just startups!
• We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy. I’m a “Back to the Future” fan, so I picked this book up as soon as it came out. It’s a great behind-the-scenes look at how the movie was made, with plenty of amusing details I had never head about.
• The Wright Brothers. A wonderful story about perseverance and continuous design. The Wright brothers were up against well-funded groups that were also chasing the dream of flight, but their self-taught knowledge and patience won the day. Fun read, meticulously researched. I have a fundamentally greater appreciation for the magic of flying.
• The Swimmer. Great non-fiction book with a meaty plot and some unexpected turns. Story about spies, international intrigue, and corruption.
• The Connected Company. Extremely relevant book about how customers and their networks have changed the nature of the relationship between consumers and companies. Instead of designing services around internal efficiency, successful companies focus on customers and experiences. Almost EVERYTHING you buy today is a service in some fashion. For example, a Kindle is a vehicle for a book-delivery service. The author claims that most companies have yet to adjust to a service delivery model. To succeed, businesses need to empower teams at the edge (and closest to customers), “know” their customer and what they care about, and recognize the co-evolution that comes from today’s hyper-competitive environment. Some good data points and case studies.
• The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land. The Crusades came up in US politics early in 2015, and I realized that most of my knowledge of that period came from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This book looks at the history of the Crusades from both Christian and Muslim perspectives and puts endeavors in context. Well told stories of exciting battles, brutality on all sides, and the efforts by spiritually minded and power-hungry parties.
• Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. Can established enterprises take advantage of lean concepts in their IT departments? Of course, but until this book, there’s been a dearth of practical guidance targeting large, existing companies. The authors look at how companies have to rethink project management, financial management, risk and compliance, governance, system architecture, and service delivery. Culture matters, and the book spends a significant amount of time discussing the necessary cultural changes, and not accepting a “that won’t work here” answer from those that fear change. Start off your year right by picking up this book and resetting your organization.

Thanks again for being part of my “tribe” this past year, and I’m looking forward to learning from you all and engaging with you in 2016.

I enjoyed 2014 and spent much of the year learning new things and building up an exceptional Product team at CenturyLink. Additionally, I spoke at events in Seattle, London, Houston, Ghent, Utrecht, and Oslo, delivered Pluralsight courses about Personal Productivity and DevOps, and tech-reviewed a book about SIgnalR. Below are some of the writing projects I enjoyed most this year, and a list of the best books I read this year.

Favorite Blogs and Articles

After seven years, I still look forward to adding pieces to this blog, in addition to writing for InfoQ, my company’s blog, and a few other available outlets.

• [My Blog] 8 Characteristics of our DevOps Organization. This was by far the most popular blog post that I wrote this year. Apparently it struck a chord.
• [Forbes] Get Ready For Hybrid Cloud. This Forbes piece kicked off a series of posts about Hybrid Cloud and practical advice for those planning these deployments.
• [CTL Blog] Recognizing the Challenges of Hybrid Cloud: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV. In this four-part series, I looked at all sorts of hybrid cloud challenges (e.g. security, data integration, system management, skillset) and proven solutions for each.
• [InfoQ] I ran a program about cloud management at scale, and really enjoyed conducting this interview with three very smart folks.
• [My Blog] Richard’s Top 10 Rules for Meeting Organizers. The free-wheeling startup days are over for me, but I’ve kept that mindset even as I work for a much larger company now. Meetings are a big part of most company cultures, but your APPROACH to them is what determines whether meetings are soul-sucking endeavors, or super-useful exercises.
• [My Blog] Integrating Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services with Salesforce.com. I don’t know the real future of BizTalk Services, but that didn’t prevent me from taking it for a spin. Here, I show how to call a Salesforce.com endpoint from a BizTalk Services process.
• [My Blog] Using SnapLogic to Link (Cloud) Apps. Cloud-based integration continues to gain attention, and SnapLogic is doing some pretty cool stuff. I played around with their toolset a bit, and wrote up this summary.
• [My Blog] Call your CRM Platform! Using an ASP.NET Web API to Link Twilio and Salesforce.com. Twilio is pretty awesome, so I take any chance I can to bake it into a demo. For a Salesforce-sponsored webinar, I built up a demo that injected voice interactions into a business flow.
• [My Blog] DevOps, Cloud, and the Lean “Wheel of Waste.” I’ve admittedly spent more time this year thinking about organizational structures and business success, so this post (and others) reflect that a bit. Here, I look at all the various “wastes” that exist in a process, and how cloud computing can help address them.
• [My Blog] Comparing Cloud Provisioning, Scaling, Management. I love hands-on demos. In these three posts, I created resources in five leading clouds and tried out all sorts of things.
• [My Blog] Data Stream Processing with Amazon Kinesis and .NET Applications. There are so many cool stream-processing technologies out today! Microsoft shipped the Event Hubs over the summer, and AWS launched Kinesis a half-year before that. In this post, I took a look at Kinesis and got a sample app up and running.
• [CTL Blog] Our First 140 Days as CenturyLink Cloud. This was my opportunity to reflect on our company progress six months after being acquired by CenturyLink.

Favorite Books

Of the couple dozen books that I read this year, these stood out the most.

• Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Shaping Global Markets. This book may be twenty five years old, but it’s still pretty awesome. The author’s thesis is that “providing the most value for the lowest cost in the least amount of time is the new pattern for corporate success.” The book focuses on how time is a competitive advantage that improves productivity and responsiveness. Feels as true today as it was in 1990.
• How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Love him or hate him (I happen to love him), Dilbert-creator Scott Adams is someone who challenges convention. In this enjoyable read, Adams delightfully recounts his many failures and his idea that “one should have a system instead of a goal.” Lots of interesting advice that will make you think, even if you disagree.
• Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. The author states that “people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.” He then proceeds to explain how companies fail to motivate staff and engage customers by focusing on the wrong things. The best leaders, in Sinek’s view, have a clear sense of “why,” and motivate customers and employees alike. Good read and useful insight for existing and aspiring leaders.
• The Practice of Cloud System Administration: Designing and Operation Large Distributed Systems, Volume 2. If you are doing ANYTHING related to distributed systems today, you really need to read this book. I reviewed it for InfoQ (and interviewed the authors), and found it to be an extremely easy to follow, practical book that covers a wide range of best practices for building and maintaining complex systems.
• Creativity, Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Probably the best “DevOps” book that I read all year, even though it has nothing to do with technology. This story from the founder of Pixar is fantastic. His thesis is that “there are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process.” There’s some great insight into Pixar’s founding, and some excellent lessons about cross-functional teams, eliminating waste, and empowering employees.
• The Art of War. A classic strategy book that I hadn’t read before. It’s a straightforward – but thoughtful – guide to military strategy that relates directly to modern business strategy.
• Service Innovation: How to Go from Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services. What does it actually mean to bring innovation to a service? This book looks at customer-centric ways to identify unmet needs and deliver outcomes that the customer would consider a success. Very helpful perspective for those delivering any type of service to a (internal or external) customer base.
• The Assist: Hoops, Hope, and the Game of Their Lives. Phenomenal story about a basketball coach who was all-consumed with ensuring that his underprivileged student-athletes found success on and off the court.
• The Box: How Shipping Containers Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. I can’t tell you how many times my wife asked me “why are you reading a book about shipping containers?” I loved this book. It looks at how a “simple” innovation like a shipping container fundamentally changed the world’s economy. It’s a well-written historical account with lessons on disruption that apply today.
• Mark Twain: A Life. This was a long, detailed book for someone with a long, adventurous life. A fascinating account of this period, the book recounts Twain’s colorful rise to global renown as a leading literary voice of America.
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. The excellent DevOps book “The Phoenix Project” owes a lot to this book. The Goal tells a fictitious tale of a manufacturing plant manager who faces higher expenses and long cycle times. The hero discovers new ways to optimize an entire system by digging into bottlenecks, capacity management, batch sizing, quality, and much more. It’s a fun read with tons of lessons for software practitioners who face similar challenges, and can apply similar solutions.
• Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less. Spreading a culture of excellence to more people in more places requires hard work, relentless focus, a shared mindset, and amazing discipline. This book is full of case studies and guidance for successful (and unsuccessful!) scaling.
• Jim Henson: The Biography. An outstanding, meticulously-detailed biography of one of the most talented and creative individuals of the last century. Great insight into team-building, quiet leadership, and taking risks.

A heartfelt thanks to the 125,000+ visitors (and 207,000+ page views!) this year to the blog. It’s always a pleasure to meet many of you in real life, or in other virtual forums like Twitter. Here’s to the year ahead, and more opportunities to be inspired by technology and the the people around us.

The year is nearly up, and it’s been a good one. 30+ posts on the blog, job changes, 4 new Pluralsight courses, twice-monthly InfoQ.com contributions, graduation with a Masters Degree in Engineering, and speaking engagements around the world (Amsterdam, Gothenburg, New Orleans, San Francisco, London, and Chicago). Here’s a quick recap of my favorite blogs posts (from here, or other places that I write), and some of the best books that I read this year.

Blog Posts

While this was one of my quieter years on the blog, I probably wrote more than ever before thanks to the variety of places that I publish things. Here were some of my favorites:

• Using ASP.NET SignalR to Publish Incremental Responses from Scatter-Gather BizTalk Workflow. One of my favorite demos of the year. In this post, walk through a way to send incremental feedback from a long-running workflow. I mashed up ASP.NET SignalR with BizTalk Server to trickle back results as soon as the workflow receives them.
• 5 Things That I’ve Learned About Working Remotely. It’s been nearly 18 months of being a remote employee of Tier 3 (now CenturyLink), and this post captured some of my thoughts during the adjustment period.
• Creating a “Flat File” Shared Database with Amazon S3 and Node.js. I finally collected a bunch of thoughts about “cloud integration patterns” into a Pluralsight course this year, and this demo was a highlight for me. In it, I showed how an Object Storage repository can be used as a “database” for shared HTML content. And yes, it was cool that AWS CTO Werner Vogels liked it too …

  Great decoupling: "Creating a “Flat File” Shared Database with Amazon S3 and Node.js" /by @rseroter http://t.co/z5ZerJO0jT

  — Werner Vogels (@Werner) May 12, 2013

• I wrote a series of posts about where to host Node.js and .NET applications. This was the first time a post of mine reached the Hacker News front page, and it was fun to see the avalanche of visitors that followed.
• Connecting Force.com to on Premises Resources, Part 2. The Salesforce.com team asked me to write a bunch of articles targeted at .NET developers, and this was one that I enjoyed. It was a two-part series of posts about using the Windows Azure Service Bus to access on-premises services from a Force.com application.
• Look Beyond the Sticker Price: What It REALLY Costs to Run a Cloud App. This post was on the Tier 3 company blog, and looked at all the facets to consider when pricing out a cloud scenario. I spent a lot of time focusing on that this year, and will continue digging into this in 2014.
•  Five Best Practices for Accelerating Your Enterprise Cloud Strategy. Enjoyed researching and sharing this post for those trying to get started on a cloud journey.

Books

I read a few dozen books this year, and these were the ones that stood out for being informative, interesting, and inspirational.

• The New Kingmakers. Excellent analysis of the critical role that developers play in the success (or failure) of organizations. Read my book review here.
• James Madison and the Making of America. Fascinating read about one of the key architects of the U.S. Constitution and one of the most influential Americans in history.
• The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work. Enjoyable book from Scott Berkun who joined WordPress.com after a career with more “traditional” companies. Great insights into working with distributed teams, and valuable tips for anyone looking to build a high performing organization.
• Thinking, Fast and Slow. The goal of the book is to “improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice” and the author provides some eye-opening examples and tools for making better decisions.
• The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. Wonderful book – that is being turned into a movie – about a special WWII unit that hunted down all the artwork stolen by Nazis. Good story of dedication to a mission despite incredible obstacles.
• The Power of Communication: skills to Build Trust, Inspire Loyalty, and Lead Efficiently. The author describes communication as an “act of will directed toward a living entity that reacts” and spends the rest of this useful book describing the correct approach towards effective communication
• The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All. I like true stories that I can learn from, and this book has great examples of successful – and unsuccessful – attempts at leadership. Good lessons about communication, planning, collaboration, and more.
• Everything is Obvious: * Once You Know the Answer. Thought-provoking read about common sense being “a grab bag of logically inconsistent, often contradictory beliefs.” and how we rarely seem to learn the real lessons from history. I read a lot of books this year about decision making, and this may have been the best.
• The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention. Can a book about trains be interesting? It sure can when it’s about the history of invention, and how the development of the steam engine is one of the things that “transformed all of humanity.”
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. Must-read book that uses a novelized story to describe the true spirit of DevOps. If you’ve ever worked in a challenging IT environment and hoped for a better way, this book shows the path towards improvement.
• Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball. My obligatory “baseball” book of the year. It’s an honest autobiography by R.A. Dickey who had a long road to the Major Leagues, and is now one of the most successful pitchers in the game.
• Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First Century Parenthood. Hilarious, wildly inappropriate set of short parenting stories from one of my favorite writers.

Once again, thanks to all of you for continuing to read my work and inspiring me to keep it up!

2011 was an interesting year. I added 47 posts to this blog, produced three training courses for Pluralsight, started contributing a pair of articles per month for InfoQ.com, released my 3rd book, had speaking engagements in New Zealand, Sweden and China, started graduate school, and accepted a new job. I’m extremely thankful for all these opportunities and I keep doing all this stuff because I find it fun and love learning new things. And I really appreciate the 172,000+ visits to the blog this year and the many of you who bought my books, watched my training and read my InfoQ articles.

In this post, I’m going to highlight some of my favorite blog posts and books from 2011.

First off, these are a few blog posts that I enjoyed writing this year.

• Is BizTalk Server Going Away At Some Point? Yes. Dead? Nope. I think this was the first blog post that I’ve written that ever went viral. I wrote this in my head on the way to work one morning and apparently it resonated with a lot of people.
• The Good, Bad and Ugly of Integrating Dynamics CRM 2011 and BizTalk Server 2010. This has inexplicably become one of the most popular posts that I’ve ever written.
• Using the BizTalk Adapter Pack and AppFabric Connect in a Workflow Service. This was one of the demonstrations from my New Zealand trip and I thought it was a cool way to do lightweight, stateful LOB communication.
• 6 Quick Steps for Windows/.NET Folks to Try Out Cloud Foundry. Lots of changes to cloud offerings in 2011 and in hindsight, I’m glad I looked into Cloud Foundry. It’s a cool platform and we’ll likely be hearing much more about it in 2012.
• It was fun to dig into the WCF Routing Service in a pair of posts. I’m not sure if this is heavily used software, but it definitely adds value in simple routing scenarios.
• Sending Messages from Salesforce.com to BizTalk Server Through Windows Azure AppFabric. I built this demo for the last book, and still think it’s a really neat way to run cloud apps but leverage onsite services.
• I had a good time exploring a pre-release version of StreamInsight Austin (“StreamInsight in the cloud”) and showed how to build an internet-friendly adapter and then how to deploy a cloud CEP app.
• Integration in the Cloud. This four-part series was the basis for my presentation at QCon Hangzhou and I enjoyed applying well-known patterns to cloud scenarios.
• First Look: Deploying .NET Web Apps to Cloud Foundry via Iron Foundry. If we assume that PaaS is the future of cloud computing, I suspect that Azure will be just one of the places that developers deploy .NET web applications to.
• I really enjoyed each of the “4 Questions” interviews in 2011 and had a blast talking to Rick Garibay, Steef-Jan Wiggers, Jon Fancey,  Buck Woody, Sam Vanhoutte, Pablo Cibraro, Allan Mitchell, Ryan CrawCour, Scott Seely, and Clemens Vasters.

It was hard to keep up my regular pace of reading a book or two a month, but I still carved out time to read some memorable ones. I admittedly read fewer deep technical books and focused more on growing as a strategist and learning to manage my time effectively.  Here are a few of my favorites from this year:

• Your Brain at Work. Great description of what tasks tax the brain most, how to decompose complex ideas, strategies for staying focused and how to be more mindful. Useful stuff.
• Blink. Gladwell is known for writing provocative books, and this is no exception.  Instead of thinking that the quality of our decisions are based on the time/effort we put into it, we should trust our judgment more often.
• The Bullpen Gospels. I’m a sucker for baseball books, and this one was immensely satisfying.  It’s a great story of a pitcher’s journey through minor league baseball.
• Do the Work. Nice little book that encourages us to jump into a task, not fear success, and to remember that “finishing” is the most critical part of a project.
• The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides. I’ve worked at becoming a better presenter over the past few years, and books like this help keep me focused on telling a compelling story without using slides as a crutch.
• fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology. Good read about articulating the real role of IT in an organization and the value of better alignment with business partners.
• recrEAtion: Realizing the Extraordinary Contribution of Your Enterprise Architects. If you’re an architect, or even pretend to be one, this is a must-read.  Fundamentally changed my thinking on what it means to be an (enterprise) architect. Continues the fictitious story from the previous book, fruITion.
• Little Bets. Food for thought about the value of experimentation as most new brilliant ideas don’t form out of thin air, but are discovered.
• Game of Thrones; A Clash of Kings; A Storm of Swords. I’m not a fantasy book guy, but after watching Game of Thrones on HBO, I thought I’d try the books. I read the first three and loved the characters and “did they really do that?” plot twists.
• The Two Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future–Just Enough. Excellent book on the real-time data revolution. Although written by the CEO of TIBCO, the book isn’t very technical but rather shows the reader the significant impact of real-time intelligence.
• A. Lincoln: A Biography. Fascinating, well-paced story of one of America’s most compelling historical figures. Lincoln was such a deep thinker and this book does an excellent job following his thoughts from early life through his successful navigation of the US Civil War.

As for 2012, hopefully you’ll see more blog posts, more training courses, and more interviews containing stupid questions.