Applying technical leadership best practices to people leadership — Most software leads started their careers as software engineers who sought out, fell into, or got tricked into leadership. Do you see yourself in any of the following? You had a great idea, started a company, and are now leading a team of engineers building a product. However, you are…

Using Coder-OSS to demonstrate the power of Kubernetes-based development environments. — I have spent a decade in charge of development tooling teams. During that time, I watched the rise and fall of Vagrant and the introduction of Docker and a plethora of other build tools. I remember when most developers had two desktops under their desks, and I helped with the…

Practical advice for engineering leaders — Becoming a lead can feel quite overwhelming. You are suddenly expected to organize projects, review code, perform quarterly planning, handle interpersonal conflicts, provide feedback, plan career growth, create offsite content, make a vision, schedule retrospectives, fire people, hire people, rotate people, keep on top of support, hold reading groups, and…

A direct comparison of my writing against ChatGPT — In today’s digital age, more and more content is being created by artificial intelligence (AI) rather than being written by human authors. This has led to a debate about the value of AI-generated content compared to hand-written blogs. While AI-generated content has the advantage of being able to produce large…

A Game of Thrones-themed synopsis of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a staple amongst the productivity genre of self-help books. It was written over 30 years ago, yet it remains a best seller, often handed out at offsites or during company onboardings. …

Success doesn’t happen by accident but through insight and planning. — I’ve led many projects over my career, and plenty of them were complete disasters. Some of them were disasters in spite of great planning, but the majority of my failures were due to faulty planning. These projects had great engineers with plenty of motivation and talent but failed anyway. However…

Automating your ticket queue with self-service Terraform repos works for more use cases than you might think. — This post argues that IT and Technical Operations teams should use Terraform to add self-service functionality to the applications they support. For IT and technical operations teams, a significant source of support work involves using their administrative powers to create, update, or delete objects in tools like GitHub, Jira, Slack…

Picking the Best IaC CI Platform Much like the black plague or TikTok, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) has dominated the DevOps industry, with Terraform as the clear winner (keep dreaming Pulumi). Unlike cloud-specific IaC libraries (e.g. …

Layering multiple architectures for an ideal ecosystem — While trying to write a post about authentication, I waffled around various ways to tackle the subject. I started by trying to write an enormous post that covered all the aspects of authentication but barely finished the outline before I threw that idea away. …