welcome

Alex Porcelli

Hi, my name is Alex Porcelli; welcome to my website!

I am a seasoned Architect and Engineer Leader, open source veteran, business automation domain expert, and a recognized leader in the Apache KIE (incubating) community - new home of Drools, jBPM, OptaPlanner, Kogito and SonataFlow. My work reflects an enduring passion for fostering innovation and collaboration in technology.

I use this space to share my personal opinions and experiences about subjects that inspire me and make life more enjoyable. These are the topics that currently keep me happy or busy:

  • apache kie (incubating)

  • open source

  • business rules and business process

  • microservices, containers and cloud-native

  • developer experience

  • user experience design and usability

  • git scaling, automation, and collaboration models

  • language design

  • devops, ci/cd

Thank you for stopping by, and I hope to see you around!

Hi, I am

Alex Porcelli

I am a seasoned Architect and Engineer Leader.

resume

RECENT WORK HISTORY

Apache KIE (incubating)

Committer

April 2008 - Present

Recognized leader and active contributor for Drools, jBPM, OptaPlanner and Kogito.

IBM Corp.

Chief Architect and Engineer Leader

July 2022 - Dec 2024

Led the transition of Red Hat Process Automation Manager (RHPAM) to IBM, establishing BAMOE as IBM's first open-source Business Automation product.

Delivered over 12 releases across 10+ quarters, achieving consistent and steady revenue growth.

Retained key clients and acquired new ones while guiding engineering teams and collaborating with product management to drive innovation and maintain market confidence.

Red Hat Inc.

Senior Principal Software Engineer

July 2020 - July 2022

Principal Architect for Business Automation tooling, responsible for collaborating across organizations and teams to ensure alignment with Red Hat overall strategy.

Latest focus was on the next-generation cloud-native business automation project named Kogito.


Principal Software Engineer

February 2012 - June 2020

Author of the OmniChannel architecture which enables Business Automation tools to be accessed through different mediums with no changes to the codebase - for example the integration with VSCode or electron.js desktop application or integrated into 3rd party websites such as Github.

In the past I acted as project and team lead. I had the opportunity to co-found the AppFormer project (previously know as UberFire) and lead the Red Hat Business Automation tooling.

MuleSoft Inc.

API Designer & Developer

March 2011 - November 2011

Hired to design and implement an internal Domain Specific Language (DSL) in Java to allow users to configure Mule ESB programmatically. A Ruby based proof of concept was also implemented.

RECENT CONFERENCES

IBM TechXchange

October 2024 (Las Vegas, NV)

- The Future of Processes and Decisions - Journey from Monolith to Micro-Processes and Decisions
- Create Cloud Native Process Applications using Kogito with Business Automation Manager Open Editions

QCon

April 2022 (London, UK)

- How Open-Source Engagement Can Accelerate & Solidify Your Staff+ Career

May 2022 (Virtual)

- How Open-Source Engagement Can Accelerate & Solidify Your Staff+ Career

March 2016 (São Paulo, Brazil)

- From monolith to cloud-ready microservices using CDI

Red Hat Summit

April 2020 (Virtual)

- The state-of-the-art of developer tools to build business-intelligent apps for RHPAM v7 and Kogito

May 2017 (Boston, MA)

- Dawn of the citizen developer: Low-code application development made easy in JBoss BPM Suite & BRMS 7

June 2015 (Boston, MA)

- Process-driven application development using Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite

Red Hat Tech Exchange

October 2018 (Orlando, FL)

- Next-gen Business Automation with Red Hat DM & PAM

CodeOne/JavaOne

September 2019 (San Francisco, CA)

- A Cloud Native Dev Is Eating My Java Cheese! (How to Get It Back?)
- Bring Back the Joy of Development with Cloud Native and Microservices Technologies

September 2018 (San Francisco, CA)

- Java EE Monolith to Cloud-Ready Architecture: Lessons from the Drools/jBPM Ecosystem
- Turning Maven into a High scalable, resource efficient, cloud ready microservice

October 2017 (San Francisco, CA)

- 5 Pillars of a Successful Java Web Application
- The Hidden Secret of Java Open Source Projects

October 2015 (San Francisco, CA)

- From Java to Microservices on OpenShift Automagically

The Developers Conference

July 2018 (São Paulo, Brazil)

- Git beyond version-control system, an alternative to data storage
- How UX can transform a large enterprise application

highlights

  • 25+ years of experience
  • Accomplished visionary defining architectures, designing features, and setting vision for industry-leading software products
  • Open source veteran and co-founder of several popular projects
  • Pioneering researcher known for synthesizing technologies into new product offers
  • Frequent speaker at conferences, universities, and user groups

coding skills

minibio

Alex Porcelli

Alex Porcelli is a seasoned Architect and Engineer Leader with over 25 years of professional development experience. A passionate open-source advocate, he has actively contributed to projects like Drools, jBPM, Kogito, Hibernate, and more for over 15 years. Alex spent more than a decade at Red Hat, where he played key roles as an individual contributor and leader in the Business Automation product line. Most recently, at IBM, he led the establishment of BAMOE, IBM's first open-source Business Automation product. Alex is also a frequent international speaker at events such as IBM TechXChange, QCon, JavaOne, CodeOne, Red Hat Summit, and DevNation.

my open source work

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Apache KIE (incubating)

Apache (incubating) project, home of the most popular open-source business automation technologies

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Kogito

Cloud-native enabler for business automation.

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Drools

Drools is the most popular business rules and decision engine.

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jBPM

jBPM is a toolkit for building business applications to help automate business processes and decisions.

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UberFire

web framework for a superior experience in building extensible workbenches and console type applications

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jitescript

Simple and modern java API for bytecode

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DynJS

DynJS is an ECMAScript runtime for the JVM.

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AUnit

An ANTLR v3 JUnit testing extension that leverages on JUnit

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PL/SQL Parser

ANTLRv3 PL/SQL 11g parser

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OpenSpotLight

Semantic Search Engine for Information Technology.

alex [at] porcelli.me