Software Delivery Club

by Richard Bown

Join my weekly newsletter to get the inside line on predictable, secure and reliable software and IT delivery. This is not a technology newsletter - this is a consequence-of-technology and the choices-we-make kind of newsletter. I talk about technology from the angle of software development practice, IT and operations, DevOps and organisational and business agility.

Sunday 21st May - When Consultants Stop Making Sense

I've been following a recent twitter spat between Dave Snowden (Cynefin) and Niels Plaeging (BetaCodex) with a rising sense of alarm and disappointment. They are both experts in the field of complexity science which chiefly occupies itself with trying to explain why in business, management is so...

Read now

12 days ago • 1 min read

Sunday 21st May - When Consultants Stop Making Sense

Saturday 13th May - Knowing What To Do Next

We do not know the meaning of a concept unless we have a method of measurement for it." - The Logic of Modern Physics 1927 - Percy Williams Bridgman It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.” - W. Edwards Deming W. Edwards Deming is known as the...

20 days ago • 1 min read

Friday 5th May 2023 - Getting What You Expect from Your Software Changes

I went shopping for a car a couple of years ago. Now I don’t know much about cars. I knew that I wanted a station wagon and that it had to be comfortable for five and it had to cost a maximum of so much. This limited my choices down to a few marques that I liked or that I had driven and had an...

28 days ago • 2 min read

Sunday 30th April - Building Legacy

It's the end of April already and it feels like we're starting to hurtle towards the Longest Day. Questions for this week: How's the job market looking? When to use serverless rather than kubernetes? When complexity is your lingua franca? After a rocky start to the year I think that things are...

about 1 month ago • 2 min read

Friday 21st April - Kubecon in Amsterdam

It's still cold in Amsterdam this week and while I’d love nothing more than to say that the tulips and the daffodils have been welcoming us into the spring in their thousands, only a few are showing their heads. Kubecon however did come to Amsterdam this week. While I didn’t buy a ticket, I did...

about 1 month ago • 2 min read

Friday 14th April - Back in the Real World

Whether you are a start-up or a long-established business, it’s easy to get distracted by technology hype. I’ve found a good technique is to dream beyond the hype - don’t let the hype define your dreams for you. Yesterday the JUICE mission was supposed to launch to Jupiter to search for signs of...

about 2 months ago • 2 min read

Friday 7th April - How To Make Better Software, Faster

New beginnings throw working practices into sharp relief. What worked somewhere doesn't necessarily work somewhere else. Even quite small decisions in tool selection and working practice can have a big impact when they become part of the working methodology. What do I mean? Let's say a team of 10...

about 2 months ago • 2 min read

Friday 31st March - The Business Perspective of IT

How would you going about describing the work you do to someone else? Would you say for example: I'm building a microservices platform in Kubernetes” Or would you say: I'm working on a system which allows customers to track their orders through our systems”? Which is more important to you? And...

2 months ago • 2 min read

Friday 24th March 2023 - AIs, LLMs and the Phoenix Project

Hello and welcome to another weekend! As we continue to ride the AI hype train - I give you three things to think about this week. Firstly, AI is a massive industry all of a sudden. It's sucking in all the talent in a global gold rush. This is explored in the article Risk of Industrial Capture...