Visitar URL original
Tammo van Lessen — Principal Consultant, Software Architecture
Portrait of Tammo van Lessen

Principal Consultant · Software Architecture

Tammo van Lessen

Right-sized architectures with domain-driven design and self-contained systems. Observability and honest communication included — increasingly for coding agents, too.

vanto/journey — git log --graph --all 8 branches · status: in flight
  • research & standards
  • open source
  • consulting
  • practice areas
  • rowing

About docs/about.md

Architecture is a team sport.

Tammo van Lessen is a Principal Consultant at INNOQ, with a weakness for right-sized software architectures. His day-to-day mixes domain-driven design, self-contained systems, and just enough monitoring to make distributed systems observable instead of a blind flight.

Much of his work is communication — architecture decision records, documentation that stays honest, workshops and reviews that get teams aligned. Lately that includes a new audience: writing specs and docs not just for humans, but for coding agents in AI-native development.

He is an elected member of the Apache Software Foundation, was PMC chair of Apache ODE, co-authored the German BPEL book (dpunkt.verlag) and served on OMG’s BPMN 2.0 Finalization Task Force — roots in process orchestration that today inform how he thinks about systems that coordinate themselves.

Focus src/focus/

What I work on

Domain-Driven Design

Strategic design, bounded contexts and collaborative modeling — cutting systems along the domain, not the org chart.

Self-Contained Systems

Verticalized, right-sized architectures — often the better answer than a fleet of microservices.

AI-native Architecture

Coding agents, harness engineering, and specs & documentation written for machines and humans alike.

Observability

Logs, metrics and traces for distributed systems — knowing what production is doing before it tells you the hard way.

Architecture Communication

ADRs, architecture documentation, reviews and workshops — because unshared decisions don’t exist.

Now CHANGELOG.md

Current & upcoming

  • 2026-10 Software Architecture Summit, Berlin upcoming
    Workshop with Roman Stranghöner: how much spec do coding agents need, documenting for agents.
  • 2025-11 W-JAX, Munich
    Talk with Stefan Negele: Developer-Portale als Architekturwerkzeug: Struktur schaffen in verteilten Systemlandschaften.
  • 2025-07 EuroPLoP 2025
    Paper with Till Schulte-Coerne: Web Frontend Integration Patterns, Springer.

Side Projects vendor/worstofbreed/

Learning from failure — at scale

AstroMITsatire27 patterns

Worst of Breed_

“If it works, it’s probably legacy code.”

A satirical field guide to software architecture: 27 battle-tested antipatterns and a Tech Horror Radar tracking the industry’s cargo cults — from resume-driven development to distributed monoliths. All the mistakes from twenty years of architecture reviews, lovingly catalogued so you can make them faster.

Also discussed on the INNOQ podcast →

// SYSTEM_STATUS: CRITICAL // LOADED_MODULES: 27 PATTERNS
  • Vibecoding
  • The SAFe Implementation
  • Fake DevOps Pipeline
  • Database as IPC
// RESUME_VALUE: GODLIKE

Publications refs/tags/

Selected writing Publications per year, 2005–2025 (approximate)

59 publications in the archive (2005–2025) — books, journal, conference & workshop papers. Browse all publications →

Speaking talks/

Selected talks & podcasts Talks per year, 2007–2026 (approximate)

Plus OOP, JAX, SOA & BPM Integration Days, ICSOC workshops, program committees and reviews for some twenty conferences and journals. All talks & committees →

Off the Water submodules/rowing

Rowing, volunteered

Away from the keyboard: volunteer public-relations work for the German Rowing Federation (DRV) — building rudern.de and small tools like the World Rowing Explorer. Four years as press officer for the national rowing team (2013–2016), coordinating TV broadcasts since. The Aktivenpass, a digital athlete pass conceived and built from scratch, laid the groundwork for the federation’s administration portal (since superseded).