Team Topologies - journey, not destination?

The Team Topologies book is 5 years old. What have I seen, learned, and imagined?

Generative AI is coming for my job. Maybe.

After using ChatGPT for a year, Copilot for 6 months, and my brain for nearly 6 decades, I can see some parallels with the past.

“Estimating is hard. Maybe impossible. So we must do it.”

Estimating software projects accurately is hard - especially when the project is poorly understood. And yet, it’s often unavoidable. Here’s a process I’ve us...

“My boss is terrible - shall I tell their boss?”

Is there a good way to complain to skip level bosses about your own boss?

Architecture, software, and business

Positional authority, persuasion, communication - what make an architect effective?

The Pyramid Principle

You’re an expert in your field - a software engineer, perhaps - and you have lots of insights to share. But you find it difficult to get senior management to...

Resilience, efficiency, hierarchies and networks

We’ve become incredibly efficient in many areas of life. But that efficiency comes at the cost of resilience. How can we adapt?

Resume advice

I have hired hundreds of people in my time - software engineers, testers, managers, directors. Here’s what I tell people when they write their CV - or resume...

Analysis + capital + execution = success

In “Succession” S03E09, the Matsson character - start-up founder, smart, not a people person - says something like “I’m bored with success. Analysis plus cap...

Software teams - what does “good” look like?

When we look at software teams and the way they work, “good” can be hard to capture. Here’s what it looks like for me.

Software architects and engineers - where do you draw the boundary?

What’s the role of an architect in a modern software development project? Here’s what I’ve learnt…

A brief thought on politics

Reading some of Isiah Berlin’s essays - he’s a great writer, and a fascinating thinker. Politics, of course, is much more of a narrative art than a science, ...

Content management systems - oh no, not again!

This weekend, I ported my blog from a Wordpress instance hosted on Site5 to a Jekyll site running on Github Pages.

This one weird trick will – well, probably do nothing.

There is no silver bullet. Success means doing lots of things well, rather than using a cheat code. Craft, taste, work - all matter more than secret tricks.

The fundamental attribution error – or why you’re an asshole, and I’m rational

I was talking to a friend online. He told me about how difficult his project is, how subtle the politics are, how he has to navigate a very fine line between...

Artificial (emotional) intelligence.

Paul Graham posted the following on Twitter the other day:

On managing development teams.

Favour learning over fixing.

Web application load and performance optimization – hunting the bottleneck.

The Internet is fun. “How many users do we need to support?” is a question I have heard hundreds of times, and nearly always, the answer is “I don’t know….”....

Running a good meeting.

Running a meeting is an art form. I don’t know anyone who actively enjoys meetings, and I often find myself in meetings which feel like a waste of time. But ...

Software engineering career ladders

This conversation seems to keep coming up – “how do we give software engineers (in the widest sense – DevOps, QA, etc.) a career ladder that allows them to p...

Slices, layers, tiers, components – oh my!

A few days ago, I wrote about my experience delivering a large web project and compared it to the Hertz/Accenture law suit. A friend asked me to go into more...

Databases

I’m currently reading Kleppmann’s Designing Data Intensive Applications. It’s a great book - the writing is clear but not simplistic, and there’s a great bal...

Stories and numbers: OKRs

“Where are we, and what should we do” is a question I’ve had to answer on many consulting engagements. It’s often wrapped in very different language – “How d...

Accenture and Hertz – slices versus layers

I wrote earlier about Hertz suing Accenture over the failed web replatforming. Again – I have no knowledge other than what I read in the press, and this is a...

Thoughts on the Hertz – Accenture lawsuit

Let’s start with a disclaimer – I have no knowledge of this situation other than what I’ve read on the news. This post is conjecture and opinion, not fact!

Serverless is (mostly) about money.

I’ve been working on software projects for a living for 30 years. In 1989, I worked on a COBOL application which managed orders, production schedules, billin...

Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and story-telling apes

I’ve been reading, and focusing on AI. In the fiction area, Gnomon is a complete mind-melt. One of the many premises of the book is that a “system” will run ...

Distributed agile development teams

The key to distributed, Agile software development is to get good velocity by making sure the work the developers pick up is “workable”. This means validatin...

Microservices in the enterprise – breaking out of the IT silo.

Microservices are entering the “early adopter” phase in large, established corporates.  I was talking to a friend who works for a large systems integrator, a...

Compose first, build last.

I was brainstorming a new product with a client the other day. We had all sorts of amazing ideas, ranging from cool user-interface tweaks to (almost) entirel...

Enterprise innovation through escalating bets

A lot of my work involves working with large, established enterprises to find new ways to reach customers. Sometimes, that’s “just” marketing, sometimes it’s...

Sleep habits.

I found an article online about re-setting your sleep patterns. 

Working with large, distributed teams

My last few projects have involved large-ish (up to 50 or so) teams, spread across multiple locations. I’ve been reading about this, and had the occasional c...

Customer centric businesses need to be able to iterate. Quickly

I’m seeing the concept of “customer centric” business in more of my work. Focusing on your customer’s experience is obviously a good thing.

Can an agency be a consultant?

Adweek published an article noting the rise of “consulting services” within agencies. I think it misses the point.

Offices suck.

About 5 years ago, people realized that they had better IT from Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn than they got from their own IT. Their home devices were much ...

There goes my job – again?

A fairly widely reported story last week explains how Microsoft research have created an AI that can write software. Hacker News went crazy – as you might ex...

Don’t worry what you’ll do when you leave education – your job hasn’t been invented yet.

I was listening to a podcast the other day – Tim Ferris talking to Chris Young – and there was a great quote from Chris when he discussed the relationship he...

Aligot – mashed potato that will kill you (but it’s worth it).

We went to Paris for a few days last week, and ended up in La Petite Perigourdine for dinner. It’s a corner restaurant, a few hundred yards from the tourist ...

Requirements – notes on value in software.

I was chatting with an old friend recently. We worked together in the 90s, building a custom software solution for a large, complicated multi-national compan...

Inevitable futures – manufacturing

I recently finished Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable” – it’s good, positive, often revealing. But I want to work through some of the ideas and see what scenario...

Europe.

I feel European. If I shared any of cousin Dirk‘s talents, I’d qualify to play football for 3 countries. I grew up speaking English at home, Dutch at school,...

Project management job number one: land the f**ing plane

I’ve been making software for a few decades now, and worked on all sorts of projects – small, large, complex, simple, fun, and not-so-fun. One of the biggest...

My kids don’t watch TV. How will you sell them anything?

Disclaimer – views entirely my own, nothing to do with my employer.

The tragedy of the mega-pixel

A few years ago, I met an executive from a large camera company. Before digital photography came along, this company’s marketing (and manufacturing) emphasis...

Restaurant review: Provender, Wanstead

Last week, we went for a sunday lunch at Provender, on Wanstead High Street, in North East London.

What does “good” look like?

In traditional “waterfall” software development, “good” software meets the written requirements. No matter how bad the requirements – “good” software meets t...

Is web design work drying up?

I was listening to the Tim Ferris podcast where he interview Seth Godin. Seth publishes a new post every day. I’m going to try to write more.

Food Gangnam Style – bibimbad. Yum.

Bibimbad

Wintery pasta

Now that it’s getting distinctly autumnal, I’ve been trying to recreate a pasta sauce I had in an Italian restaurant in Berlin a few years ago. No idea if it...

Motorcycle helmet review: VIPER RSV151 BL+ – do not buy.

I’ve ridden motorbikes for more than 20 years. I’ve owned and ridden Hondas, BMWs and Kawasakis. My current ride is a BMW R850R, and I love it – comfortable,...

Recipe – chicken cassoulet

I had a quick dinner at Le Pain Quotidien on the King’s Road last week. I chose the Chicken Cassoulet, and found it rather uninspired.

Recipe: Lancashire Carpaccio

Carpaccio is one of my favourite summer dishes. My variant uses dry-brined steak, and Lancashire cheese, rather than Parmesan – the combination of tangy, cre...

Tado smart thermostat experiences

Just before Christmas, I bought a Tado (http://www.tado.com/de-en/) smart thermostat online. Here’s what happened…

Book review: Tulipomania, by Mike Dash

Over the Christmas break, I read Tulipomania, by Mike Dash. The book explores one of the first documented bubbles – and seeks to understand what happened bey...

Book review: An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris

I recently read Robert Harris’s new book, An Officer and a Spy. Robert Harris is a great writer – he combines deep historical knowledge with a knack for stor...

Process, product and projects.

I’m fortunate – I get to work with some of the best-known companies in the world, and observe the way they approach software and marketing projects. These co...

What’s next?

Is it just me?

Book review: “The Essence of Software Engineering: The SEMAT Kernel”

I’ve long been a fan of Ivar Jacobson’s work – I attended a seminar he ran a few years ago on the topic of the Essential Unified Process, and it inspired me ...

Stuff I love: XBMC

XBMC is open source software to manage playing media – music, TV and movies, mostly, but you can also use it for YouTube, TED, catch-up TV, games – anything ...

Motorcycle shop you can trust

I always get my bike serviced at Howard Powell’s motorcycles in East Ham. They do a good job, are reasonably priced, and always take care to explain what mat...

Comic shop Lambiek, Amsterdam

Stuff I love: Lambiek. Lambiek poster

Stuff I love: Late Junction on BBC3

I stumbled across Late Junction about 6 years ago – it was a late evening, I’d had a tough few days at work, and got home from a long day in the office just ...

Jealous…

Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing and Pirate Cinema fame, posted a photo of his office. It’s got space, light, books, and coffee…

Mr Penumbra’s 24 hour bookshop

I bought Robin Sloan’s book “Mr Penumbra’s 24 hour bookshop“, and loved it! The book plays with lots of technology themes – cloud computing, cryptography, da...

Software development and productivity

Oh boy. This is one of those subjects – reasonable people can have valid, cogent and totally incompatible views. Here’s what I’ve learnt over the past 15 yea...

Business travel

The not-so-lean startup

In the heady days of the first dotcom bubble, I left my safe, well-paid job with a management consulting firm to join a start-up as the technical lead. The f...