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 Victorian penny dreadful, complete with roguish charlatans and cliff-hanger disasters. But we battled through it all and »
I've got a confession to make: I secretly enjoy rewriting code when requirements change. I get to think again about what I was doing and my assumptions, tidy up the lingering technical debt, make a few performance optimisations and abstract things a little bit so I don't have to worry »
Here's an article that I found in my backlog, and realised I never got round to publishing. When I wrote it I was thinking predominately about startups, but on reflection there's a lot of relevance to organisations of any size; particularly ones that are going through a lot of change, »
Firefighting is one of the biggest and most common causes of lost productivity and morale in software development. It usually manifests as developers being pulled off their project to urgently fix something - the live site is spewing 500 errors, there's a button in the wrong place, or a senior »
There's a question enterprise companies ask about startups. "How are we being beaten by ten guys in a loft in Shoreditch? We've got so many more resources than they have!" And more often than not when challenged they double down on more - more planning, more market research, more project »
A conversation today reminded me of my musings about waste from a couple of months ago. The context being that Scrum is misunderstood more often than it's understood, the relatively broad statements of the Agile Manifesto are easily abused to claim whatever you're currently doing is "agile", and in any »