Martin Fowler

Fowler grew up in Walsall, England, and attended Queen Mary’s Grammar School. From 1983 to 1986 he studied at University College London, earning a BSc (Eng) in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science.⁠[1]

After graduating he stayed in London, working at Coopers & Lybrand and at a small tech company, Ptech, before becoming an independent consultant in 1991; in 1994 he moved to Massachusetts and continued consulting independently.⁠[1]

In 1996 he published Analysis Patterns; all of his books have been published by Addison-Wesley, an imprint of Pearson, and they also include UML Distilled.⁠[2][1]

In 1999 the first edition of Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, written with Kent Beck, came out. The book describes refactoring as improving the design of an existing code base through a series of small behavior-preserving transformations, and most of it details around seventy refactorings. He calls it “the book that I’m proudest of,” because of its high impact on software development.⁠[3]

In the late 1990s he wrote a column for Distributed Computing magazine. In 2000 Planning Extreme Programming, co-written with Kent Beck, was published.⁠[1][2]

In spring 1999 Fowler began working with the software delivery company Thoughtworks, and he joined it in 2000. He says the key reason he joined was that the company really believes people are its biggest asset.⁠[1][4]

From February 11 to 13, 2001, seventeen people representing Extreme Programming, Scrum, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming and others met at the Snowbird ski resort in Utah and produced and signed the Manifesto for Agile Software Development; Fowler was one of the signatories.⁠[5][6]

At the meeting, the only concern about the term “agile” came from Fowler, who noted that most Americans did not know how to pronounce the word.⁠[5]

In 2002 he published Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, with Dave Rice, Matthew Foemmel, Edward Hieatt, Robert Mee and Randy Stafford.⁠[2]

That year Addison-Wesley launched its signature series hosted by leading authors; Fowler was one of the first “signers,” requiring books in his series to give in-depth coverage of long-lived fundamentals for hands-on technical leaders in enterprise applications. The series has collected seven Jolt awards.⁠[2]

In the early 2000s he spent five years as editor of the design column of IEEE Software. In 2003 he started the “bliki” on martinfowler.com for more informal writing.⁠[1]

His later books include Refactoring: Ruby Edition (2009), with Jay Fields, Shane Harvie and Kent Beck; Domain-Specific Languages (2010), with Rebecca Parsons; and NoSQL Distilled (2012), with Pramod J. Sadalage.⁠[2]

In 2005 Fowler became an American citizen while retaining his UK citizenship.⁠[1]

On March 25, 2014 he and James Lewis, a principal consultant at Thoughtworks, published the long article “Microservices” on martinfowler.com, describing the microservice architectural style.⁠[7]

Fowler’s title at Thoughtworks is Chief Scientist. He says he has mostly avoided business leadership responsibilities but has served on the company’s primary global leadership team since 2017, and sees his main role as helping colleagues capture and spread what they have learned about software development.⁠[1][4]

The second edition of Refactoring, again with Kent Beck, was published late in 2018.⁠[3]

Fowler describes himself as “an author, speaker… essentially a loud-mouthed pundit on the topic of software development,” primarily for enterprise applications. For more than a decade most of his writing has appeared on martinfowler.com, where he also vets and edits articles by other writers, many of them current or former Thoughtworks colleagues.⁠[1]

He discloses that he is a salaried Thoughtworks employee holding equity in the company, that his books are his other main source of non-investment income, and that apart from Thoughtworks he holds no direct investments in companies.⁠[1]

He chaired Agile Universe in 2001 and XP2005, gave the closing keynotes at XP2000 through XP2003, and served on the program committees of OOPSLA, Software Development, UML World, XP 2001 and TOOLS.⁠[1]

Long a regular speaker at international software development conferences, he retired from speaking in 2021, saying it was never something he really enjoyed.⁠[1]

Personal website: https://martinfowler.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Thoughtworks: Official website: https://www.thoughtworks.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

X: Public account: https://x.com/martinfowler (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-fowler-com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]