10. About the author
10.1 Matthew Skelton
Matthew Skelton has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998. Head of Consulting at Conflux (confluxdigital.net), he specialises in Continuous Delivery, operability and organisation design for software in manufacturing, ecommerce, and online services, including cloud, IoT, and embedded software.
In 2015, Matthew co-founded pioneering DevOps consultancy Skelton Thatcher Consulting, which led industry thinking around operability and team design. Matthew is the co-author of several books including: Team Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow (IT Revolution, 2019), Internal Tech Conferences (Conflux Books, 2019), Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET (O’Reilly, 2016), and Build Quality In (Conflux Books, 2015). Matthew also instigated the first conference in Europe dedicated to Continuous Delivery practices for modern software, PIPELINE Conference.
In addition to holding a BSc degree from the Univeristy of Reading in Computer Science and Cybernetics, Matthew holds an MSc in Neuroscience from Oxford University, where he studied the effects of dyslexia on speech perception, and an MA in Music from the Open University, where he studied the accesibility of research materials to visually impaired musicians. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng).
10.2 Why I wrote this book
Over the course of consulting engagements around the world, I have drawn hundreds (maybe thousands!) of technical diagrams. A few years ago, I noticed that clients would comment on how effective and clear the diagrams were; as these comments became more frequent, I decided to “reverse engineer” my drawing techniques to try to understand what it was that people found so useful in the diagrams.
The result of that reverse engineering is this book and the companion workshop training course Better Whiteboard Sketches that I have run at several public and private training sessions since 2018.
I hope you find the book useful; I certainly have enjoyed distilling these techniques into this book and the companion workshop.
– Matthew Skelton