I write regularly about the human challenges of software engineering. I dive into the human factors that make successful engineering organizations and the teams and platforms at the heart of your socio-technical systems. From personal development to mental health, to leadership and team setup and organization.
Popular posts by category are shown below. If you want more then be sure to check out the full archive.
Organizations
- The Real Value of Team Topologies
What is Team Topologies? Is it a framework? Is it a set of principles? How can you start using it without having a big-bang, top-down approach? And is that ever the right approach? Two years ago… Read More »The Real Value of Team Topologies - Was Waterfall Actually Better?
A recent conversation and a Cory Doctorow rant have led me to think about how much more complicated our development lives are these days. And how much less fun. If you’re old enough to remember Waterfall… Read More »Was Waterfall Actually Better? - People Silos: Revisiting Conway’s Law
Conway’s Law is a powerful underlying philosophy that informs how modern software organisations organise. Any system you build is actually a mirror of the system you use to build it. Therefore, the corollary is that it’s… Read More »People Silos: Revisiting Conway’s Law
Leadership
- No one Knows How These Systems Are Supposed to Work
I’m on a call where it’s obvious that no one knows how to fix this system, because no one is confident in their understanding of it. How many times have you been on that call? When… Read More »No one Knows How These Systems Are Supposed to Work - It’s not all Plain Sailing
To sail is to be in constant uncertainty. The sea is never the same twice. The conditions are never the same twice. There are no two boats alike. Crews change. The experience is never the same.… Read More »It’s not all Plain Sailing - The Secrets of Quiet Leadership
I’ve been reading Quiet by Susan Cain. Only a few pages in I’m reminded about a story that makes me ashamed and a little sad. I was a new engineering manager trying to establish myself in… Read More »The Secrets of Quiet Leadership
Architecture
- Emergent Architecture and Beating the Monolith
What does it mean to support, extend or even replace a monolith and should we even try? I explore the landscape as it is now – when we feel under pressure to “do microservices” yet we… Read More »Emergent Architecture and Beating the Monolith - Defining the Bounded Context is the Key to Flow
One of the core concepts of Domain Driven Design (Eric Evans) is the Bounded Context. Here’s an excellent summary of the Bounded Context in DDD and a specification of how it should relate to source code… Read More »Defining the Bounded Context is the Key to Flow - Causes of Tech Debt and Legacy
I have talked about this on the podcast but wanted to break out a list of potential items that cause tech debt and legacy into groups to be used as a reference. Do you recognise any… Read More »Causes of Tech Debt and Legacy
Engineering
- How to Improve Development Speed using Ansible and Packer for AWS
If you’re a jobbing SRE or DevOps engineer you’ll often be parachuted into someone else’s mess and have to make sense of it. A lot of the last ten years of public cloud work has been… Read More »How to Improve Development Speed using Ansible and Packer for AWS - The Passive-Aggressive Pull Request
Have you ever had an extreme reaction to someone leaving a comment on a Pull Request (PR)? Why was that? Was it something about your mood that day? Was it that you feel attacked and don’t… Read More »The Passive-Aggressive Pull Request - Monitoring Azure DevOps Build Pipelines with Prometheus and Grafana
The best way to have a good time at work is to ensure you have just the right amount of surprises in your day. The right amount of surprises is the minimum amount of surprises unless… Read More »Monitoring Azure DevOps Build Pipelines with Prometheus and Grafana
Motivation
- Why I still love Legacy
Almost three years ago I started a podcast without really knowing where it was going. The only thing I knew was that it was good to talk about things – to talk out loud about ideas. … Read More »Why I still love Legacy - How to be a People Pleaser
Like the washing machine, we all have our time. I started to listen to you back then when you were hearing the talking of the clock, the repetitive nature of the advice doled out on the… Read More »How to be a People Pleaser - We Don’t Want Utopia: Just A Stress-free Day at Work
Following up on the ideas I talked about in Writing Software Is a Political Act, I discovered Andrew Harmel-Law’s math blog where I found this picture from XKCD. This made me chuckle but it also made… Read More »We Don’t Want Utopia: Just A Stress-free Day at Work
Personal Growth
- Writing for Tech in a Compelling Way
or “Writing as a Processing Medium” Got an idea for something? That’s great. But having an idea is not the same as selling an idea. But why do you need to sell an idea, you cry?… Read More »Writing for Tech in a Compelling Way - How to Survive DevOps
You know what I did the other day? No, how could you. I’ll tell you. I sat through a meeting where we discussed how we organise our code and our release process to deploy changes to… Read More »How to Survive DevOps - Is AI a threat to your job security?
I have a few friends who think that AI will be the end of their software engineering career. Honestly, I don’t agree with them. I started working in the 90s and we too had a secret… Read More »Is AI a threat to your job security?