“Cattle not pets” is a well-used analogy in cloud infrastructure about the change in mindset needed in order to embrace the power of infrastructure automation, auto-scaling, etc. Its point is that your servers are no longer lovingly hand-crafted machines named after characters from genres such as Lord of the Rings (guilty in a previous […]
Category Archives: Software
In my experience, estimation is the topic most re-visited in a work context in large organisations, however the question of mobbing vs pairing vs pull requests runs it a pretty close second. As with all such topics, there is no absolute right and wrong answer as it very much depends on the scenario you find […]
I watched the recording of the first #TDDLive webinar session yesterday. It was a really good conversation (nice to see a fishbowl format in action) and I’d recommend watching it if you get the chance. The part of the conversation about mocks was interesting as panellists were bringing up their experience of codebases (or people […]
At Agile Manchester 2017, John Nolan and I ran a workshop entitled Technologists are amoral/unethical: what can be done?. The idea was to examine why digital technology is generally practiced as an amoral/unethical occupation and then to ask participants to propose practical things we could do to address our behaviours. The rest of this post is […]
I recently joined Co-op Digital as a Tech Lead in Co-op Funeralcare. The team I’m working with is a true multi-disciplinary team including UX specialists, subject matter experts seconded from the wider business and even a dedicated user researcher. It’s a talented and varied group of people. You can read more about what the team have […]
The basin of an extinct volcano otherwise known as Edinburgh saw the second public outing of the “Agile: It’s not just about the development team” workshop run with Kevin Rutherford, this time at XP2016. The format was the same as the run at Agile Manchester 2015 but the time allowed was slightly longer so it would be […]
A few weeks ago, Kevin Rutherford and I ran a session at the Agile Manchester conference called “Agile: it’s not just about the development team“. In many businesses the perception is often that the development team is the bottleneck and that if only they could go faster then more customer value would be delivered and […]
We had a good debate on Thursday at XP Manchester about #noestimates. I volunteered to defend the need for estimates, so below is a transcript of my opening rant in defence of estimates… Have we earned the right to say #noestimates? Imagine I wanted a garage built and I found a builder. I show […]
…aka experiments in refactoring A couple of weeks ago I attended a session at the SPA 2014 Conference run by Sandi Metz (@sandimetz) and Matt Wynne (@mattwynne). I was looking to maintain my balance of coding sessions versus discussion or activity-based workshops so it was a toss-up between two that morning. I must admit that the session title of Replacing […]
At the end of June, Chris Cooper-Bland and I will be running a session at the SPA2014 conference called “When will we ever learn“. The main objective of this session is to identify blockers to making learning part of business-as-usual in a software development environment and to come up with some approaches that people can […]
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