SOA Architect workshops

This week I followed the SOA Architect workshops and had hoped to see Thomas Erl in action. Unfortunately he had become ill -get well soon- and asked a Toufic Boubez and Paul Buhler to help out. Boy do these dudes rock! Both are highly skilled people with a lot of field knowledge. Unbelievable how these two guys can convey the subject - and with a lot of humor as well. I almost believe that they themselves had much fun doing it ;). Both have many examples from the field and do not hesitate to put the group to work and challenge them. Not afraid to ask for more than one solution, depending on point of view or subtle case changes which have lots of impact on the proposed solution options. Also shared lots of extra insights. The participants had a lot of dialog and in-between sessions, a lot of knowledge was shared. Also expanded my network a bit.

Great class I can recommend to people who want to get trained properly. Speed is high and I feel that one needs at least some prior knowledge and perhaps some years experience in integration and even better in SOA. And at last workshops/trainings which are vendor agnostic! The kind of workshops out there which are called training are typically vendor marketing channels. But not this one! Really, if you wish good vendor agnostic training, try the SOA training provided by SOA Systems (SOASchool.com). I am planning the followup training for SOA Security and can't wait for the SOA Governance modules. It's a pity it's a bit hard to get this kind of quality training in Europe but they are working on availability for these workshops!

Also I made some new friends in Gemany, Oslo and Belgium. Hope to get another coffee when we meet again. We found this great place for coffee and bagels near the WTC called mockamore. Anytime pals, anytime! The place was a bit small but for a coffee to go it was great. Friendly staff and good coffee; fresh bagels, good products. Coffee's a bit expensive though.