Welcome to DeanOstergaard.com. This site is a very early stage work in progress.

What I hope to accomplish with this website is to share my passion for Software Architecture and Software development.

I've noticed that many people apply, or misapply, the term "Enterprise Architecture" or EA when they are either referring to a specific aspect of Enterprise Architecture or some subset of tasks and practices that fall under the EA umbrella. If you tell someone that you are working on EA you are as likely to hear them launch into the latest debate around Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), trends in Business Process Modeling, Portfolio Management, or IT Governance.

I will try not to fall into that trap. I am admittedly pretty technical, deeply interested in all aspects of the design and development of software systems with  a penchant for the development of software within the context of an "enterprise." The approaches to developing applications in an enterprise environment are different than if you are building an application that is intended to stand alone. In the former case your design and platform decisions are likely to be driven by the need for integration and reuse in order to leverage the enterprise information assets and expose them for particular applications to consume without having to reinvent the whole wheel. In contrast, a stand alone application is typically self-contained with control and scope that spans any data sources right up through the whole stack to the presentation layer.

Now, I didn't say that I wouldn't mention or talk about Enterprise Architecture. In fact, I view it as essential to the effective delivery of software systems to meet the needs of any organization.

Many project teams, either by design or by circumstance, end up narrowing their views of the problem and solution space to the context of just their project and will more often choose technologies and methods that make it easier to address their particular requirements without regard to their system's relationship to the rest of the enterprise. When project milestones and deliverables are the exclusive measure by which success is determined, longer term benefits from reuse and ease of integration often suffer in favor of the more expedient solution. This is the trap that awaits organizations that do not practice enterprise architecture.

I hope many of you will find this site valuable.

This site is being developed using Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS) that has gained a tremendous amount of popularity. It is quite powerful and pretty easy to get going. I am  fortunate in that we have an active Drupal Users' Group here in the Portland Maine area. If you're going to pick a technology it seems to make sense to choose one with plenty of resources for help and support. Drupal is built with PHP and relies heavily on XHTML and CSS for theming; more technologies that are well supported locally.

As time goes on and the main portion of the site takes shape I may add additional areas that reflect my interests. Some ideas are; a section to showcase some of my photographs, a section on Asperger's Syndrome, and an area to provide information and resources related to Songahm Taekwondo.

Feedback is always welcome.