Q&A Panel: Why We Write? Featuring Barry O’Reilly, Donald Raab & Vaughn Vernon
Writing is just as important a skill as coding and speaking for engineers to share their ideas with others.
Join the Aspiring Speakers group for a Q&A Panel with Barry O'Reilly, Donald Raab, and Vaughn Vernon on what led them to write: From social media and blogs to technical articles and books.
All three are renowned authors and recognised experts in their fields. We’ll explore what motivated them to start writing, how it has impacted their careers, and how it connects with their broader work in the tech industry, such as training, consulting, and public speaking.
We’ll also examine the practical side: how they find the time to write alongside their other commitments, what has sustained their momentum over the years, and the challenges and opportunities they’ve encountered along the way.
Guest Speakers:
Barry O'Reilly:
Barry is a veteran Architect who has held Chief Architect positions at Microsoft among others. He has also been a startup CTO, the Worldwide Lead for the Solutions Architecture Community at Microsoft, and founder of the Swedish Azure User Group. He is also a PhD candidate in software design and complexity science. Barry created Residuality Theory and authored the book "Residues: Time, Change, and Uncertainty in Software Architecture".
Donald Raab:
Donald Raab, creator of an open source Java library named Eclipse Collections, is an international Java and open source conference speaker. With thirty-five years of experience programming in twenty different programming languages, he was recognized in 2018 as a Java Champion. Donald remains a project lead and committer for the Eclipse Collections project. He is the author of the book "Eclipse Collections Categorically: Level up your programming game." Donald was a contributing author to "97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know" from O'Reilly Media. He was the winner of the JCP Member/Participant of the Year Award for 2025.
Vaughn Vernon:
Vaughn Vernon is a software ecologist, architect, and modeler. Vaughn works with executive technologists, teams, and individual engineers, as a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design, Event-Driven, and Reactive Architecture, championing simplicity in the face of complexity. He helps teams and organizations optimize to realize business-driven and reactive systems as they transform from sprawling legacy systems. Vaughn is the author of four best-selling books, as well as the curator and editor of his Addison-Wesley Vaughn Vernon Signature Series.
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See you there!