I write regularly about software development and delivery and the latest best practices and ideas for organisation design and delivery. These are typically summarised and commented on in my regular newsletter.
Popular Posts
Over the last 30 days the most popular posts have been these
How to Survive DevOpsApril 30, 2025Richard BownBelow you can find the full archive of blog articles.
2025
2024
Tuesday, December 17 - Is AI a threat to your job security? (Personal Growth) Friday, November 29 - The Real Value of Team Topologies (Organization) (team topologies) Saturday, November 2 - Self-Compassion on the Anxiety Boredom Threshold (Mental Health) (adhd, self compassion) Wednesday, October 9 - Why I still love Legacy (Motivation) Tuesday, September 17 - Exploring Neurodivergence: ADHD and me (Mental Health) Friday, September 6 - How to be a People Pleaser (Motivation) (creative writing) Monday, August 26 - The Gift of Helplessness (Personal Growth) Sunday, June 23 - How to be a Better Software Engineer (Personal Growth) Saturday, June 1 - It’s not all Plain Sailing (Leadership) Tuesday, May 21 - Was Waterfall Actually Better? (Organization) Saturday, May 18 - The Passive-Aggressive Pull Request (Engineering) (pull requests, SDLC) Sunday, April 28 - Don’t Overthink It (Personal Growth) (DevOps, software craftsmanship, software development) Saturday, April 20 - Missing The Social Cues – When The Tools Do The Talking (Organization) (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 (Organization) (ai, remote working, team dynamics) Tuesday, March 12 - How to be a Happier Software Engineer (Personal Growth) (happiness, Leadership, team dynamics) Monday, February 19 - Too Busy To Do It Right (Organization) (conway's law, Leadership) Monday, February 5 - Can Our Decisions Always Work Out for the Best? (Personal Growth) (podcasts) Thursday, February 1 - The Value of Socially Driven Architecture (Organization) (residuality theory, team topologies) Friday, January 5 - How to be a Contented Engineer (Personal Growth) (newsletter)
2023
Monday, December 18 - New Books in 2023 (Leadership) (books) Thursday, December 7 - Optimizing for Engineering Happiness (Organization) (conway's law, culture, team topologies) Friday, December 1 - Daily Habits: The Advent of Code (Personal Growth) Friday, November 24 - The Successful Platform is a Product (Organization) (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 10 - How to Embrace Complexity and Uncertainty in Programming (Motivation) (psychology, team dynamics) Saturday, September 16 - How To Build a Successful Platform Team (Organization) (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 (Personal Growth) (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 (Organization) (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 (Management) (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 (Personal Growth) 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 (Motivation) (domain driven design) Tuesday, January 24 - Learning to Fight Complexity (Organization) Saturday, January 21 - 2023: So Where Now? (Organization) Sunday, January 15 - QUEST: How To Build Great Software (Engineering) Thursday, January 12 - The Language of Change (Organization) (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 (Motivation) (Legacy, refactoring)
2022
Saturday, December 31 - Time to Take a Deep Cleansing Breath (Leadership) (ai) Friday, December 23 - The Social Legacy of Code (Motivation) (adventofcode, Legacy) Wednesday, December 21 - Advent of Code 2022: Into The Valley of Self-Doubt (Personal Growth) (adventofcode, algorithms) Sunday, December 18 - Do You Still Need ITIL and ITSM? (Organization) (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 (Organization) (technical debt) Sunday, December 4 - The Advent of Code and GPT-3 (Personal Growth) 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. (Motivation) 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) 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) Tuesday, October 25 - Colouring Outside the Lines (Personal Growth) 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 (Organization) 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 (Personal Growth) (personal development) Tuesday, September 20 - Just Fix One Thing (Motivation) (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? (Organization) (agile, project management, scrum) Wednesday, September 7 - Approvals Come First (Organization) Monday, September 5 - Is This The End Of Photoshopping? (Architecture) Thursday, September 1 - Are You An Engineer or A Dreamer? (Personal Growth) Monday, August 29 - Some People Like To Fight Fires (Organization) 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? (Organization) (continuous delivery) Wednesday, August 24 - The Power of the Business Case (Motivation) Tuesday, August 23 - Pull Requests cause Friction (Organization) Sunday, August 21 - The Lies We Tell Ourselves (Organization) (automation, jira) Friday, August 19 - Say Yes to Different (Organization) Thursday, August 18 - Why Vi or Emacs? (Motivation) Monday, August 15 - The Illusion of Control (Motivation) (software craftsmanship) Sunday, August 14 - The Four Ps of Automation (Organization) Saturday, August 13 - Why does Kubernetes even exist? (Architecture) Friday, August 12 - How to HumanOps (Mental Health) (humanops, operations) Thursday, August 11 - When The Team is Scared (Leadership) (team dynamics) Wednesday, August 10 - Brazil 1986: State Management by Committee (Organization) (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? (Personal Growth) (personal development) Saturday, August 6 - I Wanna Be Adored (Motivation) Tuesday, August 2 - Dave Farley and Allen Holub: Agile & Scrum – what doesn’t work (Organization) (agile, DevOps, Leadership, scrum) Monday, August 1 - Creativity Not Always Required (Motivation) Sunday, July 31 - When the Weekend Isn’t Your Own (Motivation) Friday, July 29 - Refining the Big Scary Story (Motivation) Thursday, July 28 - Release Cadence Considered a Poor Quality Metric (Organization) (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) Saturday, July 23 - Show No Fear (Architecture) Thursday, July 21 - Rust vs Go: Does it Matter? (Architecture) (golang, rust) Monday, July 18 - Bullshit Jobs (Personal Growth) (books) Saturday, July 9 - Building Better Software through Observability (Engineering) (observability) Friday, July 8 - How to Commit like Keith and Mick (Personal Growth) 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 (Mental Health) (project management) Friday, June 10 - How to Run a Successful Project (Organization) (agile, project management, scrum) Friday, June 3 - Please Don’t Explain It, Just Fix It (Engineering) (project management) Tuesday, May 31 - The Pros and Cons of Excel Spreadsheets (Tools & Infrastructure) Saturday, May 28 - Build or Buy? Or Both? (Architecture) Monday, May 16 - Avoiding the “Big Bang” project (Organization) (project management) Thursday, April 7 - That’s Just How It Works (Personal Growth) 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 (Organization) Monday, January 31 - Time to Stop Overcomplicating (Personal Growth) (agile, waterfall) Monday, January 17 - Brittle Systems (Organization)
