Hi everyone!

Today I’ve got two things to announce! First up, copies of my book “Antifragile Software: Building Adaptable Software with Microservices” has been reduced to a minimum price of $10, in-line with the current amount of the book that’s been written.

I’d like to say a huge thanks to everyone for buying this book! At these early stages your purchases don’t just help fund the writing of the book, they also show a real belief in the value of what the book might convey once it’s written. That’s a level of faith in me as the author that is truly humbling, and I’m very grateful. 

However, in terms of pricing I think I initially made a mistake and so have changed things up a bit. 

One thing that I’ve struggled a little with myself is charging full face value for a book that is under development. The wonderful Ralf Westphal has pointed out, quite rightly, that this can be a cause for concern for those that want to buy the book and feel that full-price for a book that’s not more than a third finished just yet is a risk too far. I’m inclined to agree, but seeing as already over 100 books had been sold at various prices I couldn’t see a way of easily rectifying the problem.

At the same time, I’ve been getting prepared to donate 20% of net book income to charity. The charity I’ve selected is YoungMinds.org.uk. This is a charity dedicated to improving the mental health and wellbeing of today’s youth, a subject very much close to my heart.

Ralf pointed out that there might be a solution to the pricing problem in the association with this charity, and so here’s what I’m proposing to do along the lines of his original idea.

So I’ve lowered the price of the book inline with the amount completed with the opportunity of course for folks to up the amount they pay if they think it is worth more. 

At the same time for those that have already bought the book I’m going to calculate the paid money difference from $10 to what they paid and then donate that to  YoungMinds.org.uk, announcing the total on the homepage. Going forward 20% of the net income will be donated to the charity, and I’ll keep a running tally on the book’s homepage.

Finally I’m going to gradually increase the price of the book as it is completed, likely in $5 steps, increasing the amount being donated to the charity as the book is completed. 

I hope everyone agrees this is a good way forward. I’m really stoked to be helping a great charity, and at the same time asking a fair price for the book as I’m writing it.

Thanks so much for everyone’s faith in this book so far and I am looking forward to turning that faith into a great book on software development as I continue to write it over the summer.

Cheers!
Russ
(from Heathrow Terminal 1, bound to Ace! Conference in Poland) 

Recently I was interviewed by Ralph Winzinger of InfoQ on the subject of building antifragile software with microservices, the main aim of the interview being to demystify these two concepts as much as possible.

During the interview I covered the following:

• Putting antifragility in the context of software systems.
• How antifragile systems can be constructed from a variety of components/services that may be fragile/robust in nature.
• The relationship between microservices and antifragility.
• Why size of a microservice is not the important thing.
• Technologies, tools and platforms that support microservices well, and those that go further to encompass antifragility.
• The relationship between antifragility and building software that adapts and is therefore agile.
• How simplicity is a key principle of a microservices architecture.
• Approaches to transforming legacy, possibly monolithic, systems towards microservices and antifragility.

The full interview has now been published on InfoQ.

Douglas Squirrel, confirmed speaker for this year's inaugural µCon conference in London, will be giving an early teaser into his insights into building microservice-based architectures in a free evening talk on June 17th at Skills Matter.

At the same time I'll be in Poland at Ace! Conference so I won't be able to make it in person, but I hope you can make it as Douglas' talk looks very interesting and a great follow-on from my initial London Microservices Meetup the week before.

Really pleased to be able to show off the fantastic µCon poster designed by the amazing Annabella Macris and the Skills Matter team!

In collaboration with the Technology Transformation Network, I'll be hosting an evening event for senior executives and IT leads on July 16th in London.

Key questions I'll be attempting to address and discuss will include:

• How do you encourage innovation in a large organisation? What are the key technical and cultural barriers?
  
• How do you safely take advantage of innovative emerging technology in a large organisation, where you may not have the requisite experience?
  
• Once innovation has been successful, how do you attempt to bring that back into the fold in a way that is both safe but takes the most from the lessons learned during the journey?
  

It's going to be a fascinating evening, and spaces are limited to just 22 attendees. 

If you'd like to attend please use the contact information on the event announcement on the TTN site.

I'm really pleased to announce that Jeppe Cramon will be speaking at µCon: The Microservices Conference.

Jeppe will be diving through the contentious and interesting topic of "Microservices - SOA reminded of what it was supposed to deliver?".

Tickets are going really fast so grab yours today at the early-bird price of £200.

I'm very pleased to announce that the second meet up event of the London Microservices User Group has been announced!

Provisionally titled "Clustering Considered Harmful: Simplifying your System with Microservices", this second free event will feature David Dawson, Principal Consultant at Simplicity Itself, sharing his experience of building microservice-based systems on the foundations of immutability to remove the immediate need for the complexity and false robustness of clustering.

After the huge success of the first meet up, sign-up now for this event to avoid the waiting list!

Tremendously pleased to announce another confirmed speaker for µCon!

James Lewis has been speaking about Microservices for some time now and will be sharing his experiences building software with this architectural approach within ThoughtWorks.

µCon still has it's early-bird £200 price available at time of writing but the tickets are going fast so grab your tickets at this price as soon as poss!

More great speaker announcements will be coming soon so watch this space!

Simplicity Itself has partnered up with Skills Matter to offer a special, one-off 1 Day tutorial that is an "Introduction to Building Microservices" scheduled for the day before.

This tutorial will cover:

• Understand Microservices in term of their Principles, Benefits and Challenges
• Architecting and Designing for Microservice-based System Evolution with the Life Preserver tool
• Build, Deploy and Manage Effective Unix-style Microservice Pipelines
• Simplify Microservice Management using Immutable Service Deployments
• Design and Implement Reactive Microservices
• Apply effective health and monitoring for microservices
• Design and Implement Microservice Failover and Auto-Recovery Strategies

So if you're interested in any of the above, this tutorial is a great place to get started. The tutorial will be a highly practical, deep-dive style workshop so bring your IDEs and I hope you can make it!

I'm really pleased to announce another confirmed speaker for µCon!

Douglas Squirrel will share his experiences in explaining and demonstrating the benefits of microservices to non-technical stakeholders in the business. To really balance things out, he'll also be taking a look at exactly when and when not to apply microservices at all.

µCon still has it's early-bird £200 price available at time of writing but the tickets are going fast so grab your tickets at this price as soon as poss.

More great speaker announcements will be coming soon so watch this space!