I write about software development and the human side of engineering.
Popular Posts
Over the last 30 days the most popular posts have been these
Below you can find the full archive of blog articles.
2026
Saturday, March 21 - The Myth of The Ideal Reader (Craft and Creativity) Tuesday, February 24 - Writing Like Murakami (Craft and Creativity) (brian eno, creative writing, murakami) Sunday, February 15 - What I’ve Learnt From Publishing A Novel (Craft and Creativity) (human software, self-publishing) Sunday, February 1 - 33 Practical Tips for Freelance Software Engineers (Words of Advice) (consulting) Wednesday, January 14 - Legacy Systems and the Cost of Hidden Technical Debt (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (human software, Legacy, technical debt) Wednesday, January 7 - A Younger Model, A Local Model (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Sunday, January 4 - Making Her Smile (Fiction and Narrative Experiments) (christmas) Thursday, January 1 - My Dispassionate Friend (Fiction and Narrative Experiments) (ai, creative writing)
2025
Saturday, December 20 - At this Time of Year Just Stop Trying to Please People (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (adhd, burnout) Sunday, December 7 - Tech Won’t Fix it When It’s a Human Problem (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (ai, dehumanisation) Tuesday, December 2 - How To Stay Ethically Connected in the Age of AI (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (ai, chatgpt, dehumanisation, future of work) Sunday, October 26 - When It Feels Like You’re Going Home (Craft and Creativity) (human software, kent) Friday, October 10 - Why Did I Write a Novel about IT and Software Engineering? (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (burnout, human software, modern software engineering, mythical man month, team topologies) Tuesday, October 7 - Is Self-Publishing Something for You? (Craft and Creativity) Monday, September 29 - Life Is What Happens… (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (grief) Thursday, September 18 - HUMAN SOFTWARE: Kindle Edition available for Pre-Order (Craft and Creativity) (books, human software, publication) Thursday, July 3 - Writing for Tech in a Compelling Way (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Wednesday, April 30 - How to Survive DevOps (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Tuesday, January 28 - Creating The Best Team Culture (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Monday, January 6 - Will You Survive or Thrive in Twenty Twenty Five? (Human Stories and Inner Worlds)
2024
Tuesday, December 17 - Is AI a threat to your job security? (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Friday, November 29 - The Real Value of Team Topologies (Ideas and Meaning) (team topologies) Saturday, November 2 - Self-Compassion on the Anxiety Boredom Threshold (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (adhd, self compassion) Tuesday, October 22 - Humans Screw Up. Why Don’t Other Humans Accept This? (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Wednesday, October 9 - Why I still love Legacy (Ideas and Meaning) Tuesday, September 17 - Exploring Neurodivergence: ADHD and me (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Friday, September 6 - How to be a People Pleaser (Ideas and Meaning) (creative writing) Thursday, September 5 - The Limitations of the One-Person Consultancy (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Monday, August 26 - The Gift of Helplessness (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Tuesday, July 2 - Writing Software is a Political Act (Ideas and Meaning) Sunday, June 23 - How to be a Better Software Engineer (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Saturday, June 1 - It’s not all Plain Sailing (Leadership) Tuesday, May 21 - Was Waterfall Actually Better? (Ideas and Meaning) Saturday, May 18 - The Passive-Aggressive Pull Request (Engineering) (pull requests, SDLC) Wednesday, May 8 - Respect: How to Give It and How to Accrue It (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Tuesday, April 30 - People Silos: Revisiting Conway’s Law (Ideas and Meaning) Sunday, April 28 - Don’t Overthink It (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (DevOps, software craftsmanship, software development) Saturday, April 20 - Missing The Social Cues – When The Tools Do The Talking (Ideas and Meaning) (dynamic reteaming, team dynamics) Monday, April 8 - The Secrets of Quiet Leadership (Leadership) Friday, March 29 - Monitoring Azure DevOps Build Pipelines with Prometheus and Grafana (Engineering) (azure devops, continuous delivery, DevOps, observability) Tuesday, March 19 - Being Nice Asynchronously: The Discipline of Remote Working (Ideas and Meaning) (ai, remote working, team dynamics) Tuesday, March 12 - How to be a Happier Software Engineer (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (happiness, Leadership, team dynamics) Monday, February 19 - Too Busy To Do It Right (Ideas and Meaning) (conway's law, Leadership) Monday, February 5 - Can Our Decisions Always Work Out for the Best? (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (podcasts) Thursday, February 1 - The Value of Socially Driven Architecture (Ideas and Meaning) (residuality theory, team topologies) Monday, January 15 - Building Resilience: How to form lasting psychological safety (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (psychological safety) Friday, January 5 - How to be a Contented Engineer (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (newsletter)
2023
Monday, December 18 - New Books in 2023 (Leadership) (books) Thursday, December 7 - Optimizing for Engineering Happiness (Ideas and Meaning) (conway's law, culture, team topologies) Friday, December 1 - Daily Habits: The Advent of Code (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Friday, November 24 - The Successful Platform is a Product (Ideas and Meaning) (conway's law, platform engineering, platform team, product mindset, team topologies) Friday, November 3 - Are pipelines an effective way to build high quality software? (Engineering) (fast flow, residuality theory) Tuesday, October 31 - ADHD and Avoiding Toxic Productivity with Jesse Anderson (Ideas and Meaning) (adhd, motivation) Tuesday, October 10 - How to Embrace Complexity and Uncertainty in Programming (Ideas and Meaning) (psychology, team dynamics) Saturday, September 16 - How To Build a Successful Platform Team (Ideas and Meaning) (platform engineering, platform team) Saturday, September 2 - Azure DevOps YAML pipelines: The land of confusion (Engineering) (continuous delivery, continuous integration, DevOps, fast feedback) Tuesday, August 29 - When You Are Doing Devops (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (atomic habits, quest) Wednesday, August 23 - Avoiding Toxicity: How to Manage Cognitive Load (Leadership) (team dynamics, team topologies) Monday, August 14 - When you can’t do Test-Driven Development (Engineering) (test driven development) Saturday, July 15 - How to fix the “Failing” Team (Ideas and Meaning) (Leadership, psychological safety, team topologies) Tuesday, July 11 - When Speed and Quality are the Same Thing (Engineering) (psychological safety) Monday, June 26 - Test-Driven Development for Microservices (Engineering) (microservices, mocking, test driven development) Saturday, June 10 - Have You Ever Tried to Make Software Without Using Humans? (Leadership) (dora metrics, team topologies) Wednesday, May 10 - People Patterns and Learning How to Say No, Nicely (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (team topologies) Friday, May 5 - How to Visualise Your Systems (Engineering) (C4 diagrams) Tuesday, May 2 - How to Write Good Requirements (Engineering) (C4 diagrams, requirements) Wednesday, April 19 - How to be a Happy Engineer (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Tuesday, April 4 - Doing Gitflow means you’re leaving Business Value on the Table (Engineering) (continuous delivery, continuous integration) Thursday, March 30 - The Challenge of IT Change (Leadership) Thursday, March 23 - Learning to Live With The Phoenix Project (Leadership) (phoenix project) Sunday, March 12 - What is Infrastructure as Code? (Engineering) Wednesday, March 1 - Developer Productivity is Not a Helpful Label (Leadership) (developer productivity) Thursday, February 23 - Is Splunk better than Datadog? (Engineering) Thursday, February 23 - Why Wait to Discover Mistakes? (Engineering) (continuous delivery) Tuesday, February 14 - They Made a Documentary about React (Engineering) (front-end, react) Tuesday, February 7 - How to Deliver High-Quality Software, Faster without Feature Branches (Engineering) (continuous delivery, continuous integration) Thursday, February 2 - The Why of Building Software (Ideas and Meaning) (domain driven design) Tuesday, January 24 - Learning to Fight Complexity (Ideas and Meaning) Saturday, January 21 - 2023: So Where Now? (Ideas and Meaning) Sunday, January 15 - QUEST: How To Build Great Software (Engineering) Thursday, January 12 - The Language of Change (Ideas and Meaning) (cynefin, domain driven design, team topologies) Thursday, January 12 - Creating a DevOps Culture? (Leadership) (accelerate, DevOps, phoenix project, unicorn project) Friday, January 6 - Loving the Legacy Rabbit Hole (Ideas and Meaning) (Legacy, refactoring)
2022
Saturday, December 31 - Time to Take a Deep Cleansing Breath (Leadership) (ai) Friday, December 23 - The Social Legacy of Code (Ideas and Meaning) (adventofcode, Legacy) Wednesday, December 21 - Advent of Code 2022: Into The Valley of Self-Doubt (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (adventofcode, algorithms) Sunday, December 18 - Do You Still Need ITIL and ITSM? (Ideas and Meaning) (itil, itsm) Thursday, December 15 - Causes of Tech Debt and Legacy (Architecture) (Legacy, technical debt) Monday, December 12 - Software Engineering Happiness: The Five Ideals (Leadership) (5 ideals, unicorn project) Friday, December 9 - Podcast: How Does Legacy and Tech Debt appear? (Architecture) (Legacy, technical debt) Monday, December 5 - Skating on Thin Ice (Ideas and Meaning) (technical debt) Sunday, December 4 - The Advent of Code and GPT-3 (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Friday, December 2 - Thoughtworks: On Displacing Legacy Systems (Architecture) (Legacy) Thursday, November 24 - Rust Code Analysis in SonarCloud using GitHub Actions (Engineering) (code analysis, rust) Wednesday, November 23 - How to Tackle a Legacy Codebase (Engineering) (Legacy) Tuesday, November 22 - Find Your Unique Perspective (Engineering) Monday, November 21 - Kubernetes or Serverless and When Should You Care? (Architecture) (kubernetes, serverless) Thursday, November 17 - Legacy Code: Sunk Cost or Opportunity? (Leadership) (Legacy) Saturday, November 12 - When you code. Mean it. (Ideas and Meaning) Friday, November 11 - Does Continuous Delivery have an Image Problem? (Engineering) (continuous delivery) Thursday, November 10 - DDD, Refactoring and Legacy Code (Architecture) (domain driven design, Java, Kotlin, Legacy) Wednesday, November 9 - What Do You Need To Get Started in Software? (Ideas and Meaning) Tuesday, November 8 - How Team Topologies Changes The Script (Ideas and Meaning) Monday, November 7 - Bryan Finster -Continuous Delivery: No Nonsense Podcast (Engineering) (continuous delivery) Friday, November 4 - Does Fixing Legacy Mean I’m Not Innovating? (Engineering) (Legacy) Thursday, November 3 - Do You Need CI/CD to be successful at Software Delivery? (Engineering) (continuous delivery, continuous integration) Wednesday, November 2 - Appropriate Context for XP, Scrum and MVP (Ideas and Meaning) Tuesday, November 1 - Towards an Evidence-Based Software Practice (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Friday, October 28 - Want To Succeed at Coding and Managing? (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Tuesday, October 25 - Colouring Outside the Lines (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Wednesday, October 19 - Why Loose Coupling Is Important with CI/CD Tools (Architecture) (continuous delivery, continuous integration) Monday, October 17 - The Fundamentals of DevOps (Engineering) (DevOps) Friday, October 14 - The Sunk Cost Fallacy, Fallacy (Architecture) Wednesday, October 12 - You Need Better Linux Logging (Engineering) Tuesday, October 11 - Designing Your Release Process (Engineering) (continuous delivery) Thursday, October 6 - Can You Release When You Want To? (Engineering) (continuous delivery) Wednesday, October 5 - Do You Have Hidden Delivery Debt? (Architecture) (technical debt) Tuesday, October 4 - How To Win At Jira (Ideas and Meaning) Monday, October 3 - Did You Spend The Weekend Fixing Bugs? (Leadership) (operations) Thursday, September 29 - How to Build Maintainable Software (Engineering) Friday, September 23 - Is There a U-Turn on Open Source? (Architecture) (log4j, open source software, security) Wednesday, September 21 - How To Be A Good Developer (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (personal development) Tuesday, September 20 - Just Fix One Thing (Ideas and Meaning) (atomic habits, strategy) Monday, September 19 - Software isn’t a Liquid (Architecture) Saturday, September 17 - The SaaS Product Risk Trajectory (Architecture) Friday, September 16 - The Magic of Wardley Maps (Engineering) (mapping) Tuesday, September 13 - Are You Happy With Your Front-End? (Leadership) (front-end, ux) Sunday, September 11 - The Eight Rules of Good Construction (Engineering) Friday, September 9 - Do You Love Story Points? (Ideas and Meaning) (agile, project management, scrum) Wednesday, September 7 - Approvals Come First (Ideas and Meaning) Monday, September 5 - Is This The End Of Photoshopping? (Architecture) Thursday, September 1 - Are You An Engineer or A Dreamer? (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Monday, August 29 - Some People Like To Fight Fires (Ideas and Meaning) Sunday, August 28 - How To Know When Your Backlog Sucks (Architecture) Saturday, August 27 - Is Your CI Doing Valuable Work? (Engineering) (continuous integration) Friday, August 26 - How Easily Can You Deliver New Features? (Ideas and Meaning) (continuous delivery) Wednesday, August 24 - The Power of the Business Case (Ideas and Meaning) Tuesday, August 23 - Pull Requests cause Friction (Ideas and Meaning) Sunday, August 21 - The Lies We Tell Ourselves (Ideas and Meaning) (automation, jira) Friday, August 19 - Say Yes to Different (Ideas and Meaning) Thursday, August 18 - Why Vi or Emacs? (Ideas and Meaning) Wednesday, August 17 - How Not To Worry About Agile vs Waterfall (Ideas and Meaning) Monday, August 15 - The Illusion of Control (Ideas and Meaning) (software craftsmanship) Sunday, August 14 - The Four Ps of Automation (Ideas and Meaning) Saturday, August 13 - Why does Kubernetes even exist? (Architecture) Friday, August 12 - How to HumanOps (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (humanops, operations) Thursday, August 11 - When The Team is Scared (Leadership) (team dynamics) Wednesday, August 10 - Brazil 1986: State Management by Committee (Ideas and Meaning) (conway's law) Tuesday, August 9 - How to Know When the Team is Broken (Leadership) (Leadership) Monday, August 8 - Users: The Hidden Opportunity in SaaS (Leadership) (SaaS) Sunday, August 7 - Do You Need The Default Clause? (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (personal development) Saturday, August 6 - I Wanna Be Adored (Ideas and Meaning) Tuesday, August 2 - Dave Farley and Allen Holub: Agile & Scrum – what doesn’t work (Ideas and Meaning) (agile, DevOps, Leadership, scrum) Monday, August 1 - Creativity Not Always Required (Ideas and Meaning) Sunday, July 31 - When the Weekend Isn’t Your Own (Ideas and Meaning) Saturday, July 30 - When You Can’t See the Forest for the Trees (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Friday, July 29 - Refining the Big Scary Story (Ideas and Meaning) Thursday, July 28 - Release Cadence Considered a Poor Quality Metric (Ideas and Meaning) (continuous delivery, dora metrics) Wednesday, July 27 - The Office: Dare to be Different (Leadership) Tuesday, July 26 - How the MVP has lost its meaning (Architecture) Monday, July 25 - Doing the Minimal Viable Product (Engineering) Sunday, July 24 - Getting The Basics for Kubernetes: Linux (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Saturday, July 23 - Show No Fear (Architecture) Thursday, July 21 - Rust vs Go: Does it Matter? (Architecture) (golang, rust) Monday, July 18 - Bullshit Jobs (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (books) Saturday, July 9 - Building Better Software through Observability (Engineering) (observability) Friday, July 8 - How to Commit like Keith and Mick (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Thursday, July 7 - Reimagining the High Performing Team (Ideas and Meaning) Sunday, July 3 - How to get DevOps Insights You Can Trust (Engineering) (agile, DevOps, Leadership) Saturday, July 2 - Engineering vs Product Management (Engineering) Wednesday, June 29 - Does Your Sector Matter? (Leadership) Monday, June 27 - Identifying The Busywork (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (project management) Friday, June 10 - How to Run a Successful Project (Ideas and Meaning) (agile, project management, scrum) Friday, June 3 - Please Don’t Explain It, Just Fix It (Engineering) (project management) Saturday, May 28 - Build or Buy? Or Both? (Architecture) Monday, May 16 - Avoiding the “Big Bang” project (Ideas and Meaning) (project management) Thursday, April 7 - That’s Just How It Works (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) Wednesday, March 16 - How to Think Like a Developer (Leadership) Tuesday, February 22 - You’re a Knowledge Business (Leadership) Wednesday, February 16 - Tool Selection for your Business (Architecture) Tuesday, February 15 - Thank you, Mr Conway (Architecture) (conway's law) Tuesday, February 8 - Getting Ready to Automate (Ideas and Meaning) Monday, January 31 - Time to Stop Overcomplicating (Human Stories and Inner Worlds) (agile, waterfall) Monday, January 17 - Brittle Systems (Ideas and Meaning)
