In 2015 we successfully completed work to migrate parts of our data-ingestion pipeline to a new architecture. The way in…
All my adult life I’ve been involved, in one way or another, with developing software in a commercial environment. Only rarely do I stop to wonder why someone is employing me to do this, since it generally feels self-evident, but there can be value in trying to articulate the…
Every organisation, every team, and every individual deals with issues of accountability, but we don’t stop and specifically talk about accountability very much at all. There seems to be some unspoken assumption that accountability is…
Here is my explanation of why we should be thinking, when planning, of delivering value, rather than being efficient.
We sometimes hear people (developers, product people, business people) say things like: “We shouldn’t implement the simplest thing that…
This was probably my favourite conference I’ve been to, and certainly the most important. The…
Last week I had the profound pleasure of attending the first ever COED:ETHICS conference in London.
A first of its kind, the organisers of this conference posed a question which has long been on my mind: Can developers…
For a while now, I’ve had the feeling that the teams reporting to me are trying to do too much. I’ve been taking an analytical approach, building up a list of things the teams are doing and reflecting on our planning process to get some insight into how we reached our current workload — and to some…
In my first post on my stumbling down memory lane I gave an introduction to how I believe my memory works and how it affects my life & interactions, below I go in to some more specific situations.
Collaboration is a central tenet of agile software development. It’s an empirical observation that the best solutions to problems involving technology are solutions that emerge from multiple perspectives reflecting on the problem over time — that is, they are inherently collaborative. Even if we believe…
As always, it started with a bug. We’d been extending the capabilities of one of our services, to allow filtering deals on a new concept. While introducing that new concept, some classes had new fields added. One of those classes implemented equals(), but the method wasn’t updated to…
equals()