This has been one of those weeks where a bomb is dropped that turns the week you had in mind upside down. Not that it’s a bad thing, but it’s been a week that I was not expecting at all. What I’ve been doing There have been some high-profile leavers this week (which I can’t publicly discuss) but it has shaken the office a little, it’s also meant lots of internal networking....
Trying something new, not sure if it will stick, might delete later. I’ve been going on a bit of deep dive of trying to push more of my thoughts, ideas, resources and other random half-baked things out into the universe to see if anyone else gets value from them and that’s when I came across the idea of weeknotes. Not sure if it’ll work or not and it’ll have a very different tone than my usual blog posts, so let’s see....
A love letter to RSS It has recently come to my attention that the technology I assumed foundational to the internet as I know it, RSS, is not something that everyone is aware of and using. The internet has gone through several generations and people’s interactions and habits along with it. Web 1.0 was an era of web portals, Web 2.0 the era of search and social and now the more recent generation where decentralisation, AI and IndieWeb are the topics of exploration....
I’m back! It’s been a almost a year since my last post, primarily driven by going deep into a new role at work (more on that to come). Despite the lack of posts, I’ve certainly not stopped writing and I now have a range of new research topics that you going to hear more about from me over the next few months. What’s changed I’ve also not stopped with making one or two changes to this site....
Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the use of wardley mapping to map my skills for career development. I think it’s important to think strategically about your career development, whether you’re early in your career looking to land that dream job or later and looking to transition into a role or company that reignites your passions. In my last post I talked about my journey developing my first skills maps and some of the mistakes I made along the way....
Over the past few months the tech industry has been going through the shock and awe of corporate downsizing that occurs when the economy feels like its about to enter a recession. Big Tech is making layoff after layoff, typically around 10% of the workforce and those are the ones we know about. Many tech companies (and others) will start following suit, even if not as publicly, as the market shrinks and spending slows with companies trying to save cash and preserve profits....
In Aug 2021 I wrote my original post describing my knowledge management and productivity workflow, including the various tools I’d stitched together and some of the challenges I was having. Over a year on and I’ve been making some more significant changes to that tooling and as 2022 comes to a close I thought I would look back on that original post and reflect on what I’ve changed, fixed and learnt along the way....
Intro (what even is it?!) I have been a developer and a DevOps engineer (or whatever the latest title is now) for most of my career and I like my systems to be reliable and well architected. I like being confident that when the unexpected happens, and it always does, that the systems that I am responsible for can handle it and not wake me up at 2am. When I talk to developers, I’m often talking about testing and the testing pyramid - we all know it’s value and the positive investment that it is....
In the first two parts of this series, I talked about the problem space of mixed operating models in an organisation, why it exists and how to prepare for it. In this post I want to talk about the most important and often most challenging element of operating mixed operating models within an organisation: the cultural change. Any transition of working practices requires a corresponding and iterative process of empathetic change management, where with every modification and iteration, context is given for the changes, conversations are had with those who might be effected and (unlike many corporate change management initiatives) the process includes the input of those on the front-line of the changes....
In the first post on Mixed Operating Models I discussed that each application in your landscape, both custom built and third-party will need a different type of operating model and using wardley mapping to map that landscape will give the context of which model is appropriate and at what time. Transitioning between models won’t be easy and requires both technical and cultural changes to be successful. In this post, I will talk about the technical aspects that act as a foundation to any operating model change and cultural shift....