Interview: Richard Seroter. Author of SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009

Richard Seroter is a solutions architect for an industry-leading biotechnology company, a Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server, and a Microsoft Connected Systems Advisor.

He has spent the majority of his career consulting with customers as they planned and implemented their enterprise software solutions. Richard worked first for two global IT consulting firms, which gave him exposure to a diverse range of industries, technologies, and business challenges. Richard then joined Microsoft as a SOA/BPM technology specialist where his sole objective was to educate and collaborate with customers as they considered, designed, and architected BizTalk solutions. One of those customers liked him enough to bring him onboard full time as an architect after they committed to using BizTalk Server as their enterprise service bus. Once the BizTalk environment was successfully established, Richard transitioned into a solutions architect role where he now helps identify enterprise best practices and applies good architectural principles to a wide set of IT initiatives.

Richard is the author of the recently released SOA Patterns for BizTalk Server 2009 book which takes a look at how to apply good SOA principles to a wide variety of BizTalk scenarios.

Richard maintains a semi-popular blog of his exploits, pitfalls, and musings with BizTalk Server and enterprise architecture at http://seroter.wordpress.com.

How did you find the overall experience of writing your book for Packt?
I actually really enjoyed it. This was my first book, and I knew that writing as a solo author would be a challenge, but it was quite rewarding to do all the research and craft the chapters just the way I wanted. Packt did a great job keeping me on schedule and communicated the pending deadlines effectively. The acquisition editor James Lumsden was quite useful helping me refine my initial outline and focusing my objectives.

During the writing process, did you come across any issues/ difficulties that affected your writing and how did you overcome these?
The book was originally slated to be in the neighborhood of 200 pages, but we all quickly realized that we were going to land quite higher than that. I was originally concerned that I wouldn't have enough to say, but as time progressed, I had the opposite issue of paring down content and working to be more concise. The Packt editors helped with this during the initial few chapters, and I quickly learned how to best outline my chapters and maintain a relatively succinct set of topics per chapter.

I also had the pleasure/pain of writing about a product version that was still being developed by Microsoft. This meant that documentation and features were often incomplete or nonexistent. Early in the process, I realized that I'd need a channel into Microsoft for direct questions, and fortunately the folks in Redmond provided me with a number of contacts who could answer questions when I had reached wits end.

Whilst writing your book, did you find that it overshadowed personal life in any way? How did you deal with this?
I was told by a co-worker, who is a prolific author, that I had to expect that writing a book would be like having a second job for months on end. I had discussions with my family prior to starting this endeavor, and we worked out a reasonable schedule where I would write for a few nights a week, and take a vacation day every other Friday so that I could have long, uninterrupted writing sessions. While this plan worked fairly well, there were still plenty of weekend days and extra weeknights where looming deadlines forced me to sequester myself and miss time with family and friends. However, careful planning kept this to a minimum.

Was there anything interesting that happened during the writing of the book?
Nothing spectacular, besides trying to review another book and still keep my day job!

How did our Acquisition Editors help you - what kind of things did they help you with and how did they support you throughout the writing process?
Your Acquisition Editor did a fantastic job coaxing me along the process and offering suggestions about topics and format. He also served as a valuable conduit into Packt when I had general purpose questions. He's probably thrilled that the book is done so that he can have some peace and quiet!

Our authors usually have full-time jobs and or/ previous commitments whilst writing for us. Was this the case for you and how did you approach managing your time?
I do have quite a busy "day job" and a young child at home, so it made it a balancing act to perform all my responsibilities at an acceptable level. I had distinct writing times during the week which allowed me to focus on my core job during the day and not allow my mind to wander to the book. That said, I definitely used lunch hours to do research and brainstorming, but I decided early on to keep a fairly clean line between my two "jobs."

What benefits did writing a book bring to your specialist area?
It definitely allowed me to dig deeper into software architecture concepts that I have long been familiar with. This helped me in my day job and also allowed me to further my product knowledge which hopefully resulted in some interesting blog posts during this period. I believe that my book writing had a real impact on Microsoft's renewal of my MVP award for 2009.

Do you have any tips for other authors, or tricks that you learnt whilst writing, that you'd like to share?
Instead of just digging into the writing phase of the book, I really benefited by doing hyper-outlining ahead of time. The pace of this book was aggressive (a new chapter every three weeks), so I typically spent 1 week or so doing deep research into the given chapter, plotting my demonstrations and then spent multiple days writing up very detailed outlines for each chapter. This helped prevent writers block since I had all my chapter headings, subheadings and content summaries before I really sat down to write. The core writing phase of each chapter was fairly quick as a result.

Do you have any advice for other authors who may be interested in writing for Packt, but are still unsure?
My advice would be to work with the Packt team and try to flush out an outline that interests you. There's no cost in that exercise, and if you decide that you don't have enough content, or time to write a book, there's no penalty. I was impressed by Packt's attentive personnel and rapid responses and their effective coordination of my three technical reviewers. My book has just released, so I can't say too much yet about the marketing team, but my expectations for them are high as well.

What projects, if any, are you working on at the moment?
I'm looking at writing some white papers and considering book topics on a wide range of topics.