ThoughtWorks Inc - The ThoughtWorks Anthology, Volume 2: More Essays on Software Technology and Innovation

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While many companies are primarily defined by a business model, ThoughtWorks is primarily defined by a social model. We define three pillars to measure success in our business and to influence our business decisions.

• Run a sustainable business.

• Champion software excellence, and revolutionize IT.

• Advocate passionately for social and economic justice.

This ThoughtWorks business and social model continues to motivate us to challenge notions about organizational structure and business success. This social experiment that is ThoughtWorks will of course evolve, but wed like to think ThoughtWorks will still be around and shaking things up in 100 years. And if youre around then, think of what a shelf of anthologies youll have to leaf through!

As a specialized-generalist, T-shaped thinker, Farooq loves to help teams create innovative solutions by looking at problems from many different angles. As a lead consultant, hes worn many different hats over the years at ThoughtWorks: developer, business analyst, project manager, experience designer. Farooq has always had a strong passion for visual thinking, be it in product ideation, code aesthetics, or data analysis. These days he heads the ThoughtWorks Social Impact Program in the Americas, helping tackle problems that lie at the intersection of technology, innovation, and social impact.

Ola Bini works as a language geek for ThoughtWorks in Chicago. He is from Sweden, but dont hold that against him. He is one of the JRuby core developers and has been involved in JRuby development since 2006. At one point in time, Ola got tired of all existing programming languages and decided to create his own, called Ioke. Then he did it again and started work on Seph. He wrote a book called Practical JRuby on Rails projects for Apress, coauthered Using JRuby for the Pragmatic Programmers, talked at numerous conferences, and contributed to a large number of open source projects. He is also a member of the JSR292 Expert Group.

His main passion lies in implementing languages, working on regular engines, and trying to figure out how to create good YAML parsers.

Brian worked at ThoughtWorks as a lead consultant for more than three years. During that time he worked on the delivery of a number of bespoke software systems for high-profile clients, from large customer-facing websites to real-time stream computing platforms. He has done a number of talks on JavaScript testing and currently works as an independent software consultant in London.

James is an agile software developer with a background in QA. He has been involved in many test automation efforts with ThoughtWorks and strongly believes that a good test suite is a test suite the whole team shares. When hes not fiddling around with computers, hes fiddling around with cars.

Neal Ford is director, software architect, and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks. He is also the designer and developer of applications, magazine articles, video/DVD presentations, and author/editor/contributor for eight books spanning a variety of subjects and technologies. He focuses on designing and building large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at more than 300 developer conferences worldwide and delivering more than 2,000 presentations.

Check out his website at http://nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Martin is a self-described author, speaker...essentially a loud-mouthed pundit on the topic of software development. He has worked in the software industry since the mid-1980s where he got into the then-new world of object-oriented software. He spent much of the 1990s as a consultant and trainer, helping people develop object-oriented systems, with a focus on enterprise applications. In 2000 he joined ThoughtWorks.