Blog

Bootstrapping software delivery

• Getting started

  Often when setting up a new project/ programme/ product we forget to make our principles, constraints, and ways of working visible. There tends to be a group understanding however, churn happens and tribal knowledge dissipates. From no fault of any individual this can end in disaster and inevitably many difficult conversations.

• Get your teams up and running

  Joining a new team is often painful and slow. Often you have to work out who to talk to, what software to install, request to be invited to meetings, hunt around for access to environments and repositories, and many more tasks. Without clear documentation, things will fall through the cracks giving vastly different onboarding experiences to new joiners. This post’s goal is to streamline your JML process, delivering value faster.

• Ways of working

  It is important that everyone in the team has a shared understanding of how they work together, however having the right level of documentation is tricky, especially around ways of working. Not enough will cause team members to not understand principles, boundaries or constraints which could impact mental health, and too much will overload team members, running the risk of key pieces of information being overlooked. Finding a balance is important and is an ongoing task and requires continual care.

Guides

• How? what? why?

  So, I’ve thrown together a new blog. This is how I built it and how I ended on this tech stack. Pop over to my github page to view the code.

• Hello world

  Over the years I’ve run loads of workshops, brownbags, knowledge transfers, presentations and lightning talks. I’m immensely proud of what I achieved, however failed to really document or share these outside of the initial group. This felt wasteful.

• I built a build monitor

  Christmas is usually a time for me to catch up with friends and family. Every day tends to be filled with drinks and dinners with friends or recovering on the sofa, it’s an enjoyable few weeks in which I am not particularly productive. This year is different. The pandemic ruined everyone’s plans and I now have lots of time on my hands, this is a perfect opportunity to learn something new.

• Training in pseudo situ

  A developer’s role is not just code, and a BA’s role is not just story writing, anyone in the industry will attest to this. However many training programs offer little in the way of understanding the role and expectations for a member of an autonomous team; these lessons are commonly deferred. Learning these on the job.

Workshops

• Getting started with elastic search

  I recently engaged with a client that wanted to improve their search relevance and speed. We decided to run some experiments to see if Elasticsearch would be a good fit.

• Get to production

  Over the summer I was lucky enough to speak at Karta conference in Frankfurt. I presented a lightning talk on CI/CD followed by a workshop called ‘Get to production!’. The goal of the talk and workshop was to cover the pipeline basics and for the group to have the opportunity to create and deploy a simple application using pipelines as code.