teams How to really identify a 10x developer The sudden trending of "hashtag 10x developer" worries me. It worries me because it's not really about 10x performance, at least most of the time I've seen it. Instead, it tends to bundle two often overlapping movements which are unrelated to performance.
agile Agility and the power of No One of the nice things for me about writing is I get to go back to my old articles every once in a while and see where my viewpoint has matured, where it's changed...
organisations The 10x Developer and You I'm in the mood for sarcastic graphs. I think (I hope) that the idea of the "10x" developer is not an astonishingly new and radical one. People in the upper quartile
teams Thoughts on Interviewing I think I'm destined to always be an iconoclast when it comes to interviews. Not quite so much as the days when "let's ask programmers some questions about programming" was a
teams Thoughts on team leadership and metrics I realise that in four or so years of this site I've never talked properly about team leadership, which is a bit of an omission given how much time I've devoted to organisational
development The Unreasonable Speed of Rust Rust is fast. No, not the systems language - I'm talking about rust in the sense of losing skills in programming languages when you're no longer actively working in them. I've spent a
development How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Uncertainty Data/object anti-symmetry broke me. The reason for this breakage was established a year or two ago. I had the fortune to work with some very smart people, who were very good at
organisations Two Transformation Questions What exactly is a transformation? Is it "go to the cloud" or "be Agile" or "containerise the things"? Despite the number of organisations which state those as
teams Performance Reviews I had an interesting conversation last night about that old bugbear, the annual performance review. No matter how many well-meaning attempts have been made with SMART targets or peer review systems, every annual
technical debt The Sierra Adventure Codebase We broke something this week. Well, I broke something, if you go by code authorship. It was supposed to be a bug fix, and we did everything by the book - pair-programmed the
organisations Bias for action and agility What has linked all of the high-performing teams and organisations I've worked for or with? That title is a bit of a clue: it's a bias for action. What this means is they
teams Bad Team Leads and Responsible Adults Does a team need a team lead? I've been thinking quite a bit about flat team structures over the past couple of weeks. As is often the case, it's recruitment-driven. I'm going to
architecture Avoiding growth by accretion Software has a tendency to grow by accretion - a gradual build-up of material causing what was a small and simple nucleus to become a large, complex object with many layers. It's the
ai What my AI learnt on its holidays I spent a bit of downtime recently playing with LSTMs and RNNs - Long Short-Term Memories and Recurrent Neural Networks. These are the kind of things that power automatic image tagging, recognition, and
career What is a Technical Architect anyway? I spent a fair chunk of my career being a technical architect, most of which I also spent dreading the inevitable, "so what do you do for a living?" question at
voice Dimming the lights on voice For me, voice control is one of those technologies that seems to be perennially almost but not quite there yet. We've spent the last 20 years correcting the Word documents we dictated to
terraform Terraform - Beginner Pitfalls After a rocky start, Terraform has become a great success story where I am. We've got both infrastructure and development teams using it, sharing both learnings and resources such as modules and code.
devops DevOps: What I Learnt From A Nightmare Journey I've just finished what was a very rough journey into a fully-automated deployment infrastructure at a large scale. At times it felt more like I was in a bizarre far-future version of a
agile The Definition of Done Dashboard I've been working on an infrastructure-heavy project of late, and one of the problems our team faced was differing viewpoints on what "done" actually means. In short, we ended up with
agile Technical User Stories - Who, What and Why One of the problems we regularly face with our more technical stories (for example, setting up a monitoring stack) is explaining to the people in charge of the budget why they should pay
infrastructure IaC and the post-environment world For about a decade I struggled with the common problem of environments. You usually start off with some well-meaning attempt at a simple layout, with development, integration, staging and live. Which feels fine,
agile Too much in flight In a Scrum context, multitasking is bad. Teams who follow Kanban will be familiar with this concept, as that process invites you to explicitly set your lane limits up front - only 3
architecture Services in the Monolith It's become accepted that microservices, when done right, are a Good Thing - helping you keep your responsibilities nicely separated, easily share functionality between applications, and scale in a granular fashion where only
cloud Writing a Facebook Messenger chatbot with AWS Lambda and Terraform There's a lot of buzz around about exposing services as chatbots. Whether that's interactive chats to help you book travel, or a simple Slack bot that lets you run a build, they're turning
aws Cloud, PaaS, solution size and lock-in I have a bit of a counter-intuitive opinion on cloud services and the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) world. For me, something like AWS isn't about "big". Yes, I know plenty of companies use
