Blog Posts and Other Media

What value is short, clever code that nobody understands? Readability should usually be the first priority in any technical artifact you write.

Steve Pereira describes the concept of value stream mapping, and how it, and related techniques, can be used to improve the flow of practically any process from product ideation to delivery and customer experience. Steve is the founder of Visible, and is obsessed with making tech human, and leveraging it to deliver continuous value.

After we find land a first job we learn that correct answers often often technically inferior solutions, answers, or proposals win the day. Why?

"DevOps" is so often misunderstood, many companies who think they're doing DevOps are actually doing one of these anti-patterns.

Unless literally work alone, you will experience workplace politics. The question is: is it abusive?

We can count retrospectives, but that feels like a vanity metric. How do we know if we're actually improving?

Even in the manifesto, the word "agile" is used as an adjective, not a noun. I think this clarifies the meaning significantly.

Abhinav Dhasmana joins the adventure to discuss how he got Kafka to scale to handle thousands of messages. He explains how to scale Kafka up and how to allow applications to scale with the messaging architecture provided by Kafka.

In the best interest of the IT system as a whole, optimize for the engineer's time, since that time is expensive.

In this episode, Daniel Bartholomae, CTO of Optilyz, "borrows my brain" for a consultatative discussion about how to improve the integration of QA in a growing startup with just two dev teams.

What if you're in a business where you know all the requirements up front, you do not need to respond quickly to change?

In this short, Halloween bonus episode, I talk about a very scary technical screening process I learned about just a couple of days ago. I explain why the screening process is scary from the perspective of both the candidate, and the hiring manager.

I recently created an 8-minute video where I walk through my daly routine of writing one of these emails.

DevOps is usually viewed in the context of large organizations. But what does DevOps look like in small organizations? Does DevOps make sense in this context? Is it even feasible?

In this episode I speak with Lukas Vermeer, former head of experimentation at Booking.com, and currently working with Vistaprint. He answers the question of whether A/B testing makes sense in small companies and startups, and with small numbers of customers. We also discuss the broader topic of experimentation in general, and applying the scientific method to business development.

Will and Jonathan discuss how to get started with a career in DevOps and how companies can get things started at your company with DevOps.

I once worked with a company that had a take-home assignment as the first stage of an interview process. Ugh. Here are my suggested alternatives.

There are many times when you may want a WIP limit of less than 1 per team member. Here are some examples.