Join my newsletter for regular views and news about doing effective, essential human DevOps engineering. I dive into the human factors that make successful DevOps organizations and the teams and platforms at the heart of your socio-technical systems. From leadership to team setup, maximizing performance, tools and techniques.
Software Delivery Club Newsletter 2023-03-04
Can you believe it's March already? How is your year getting on?
It was spring break/voorjaarsvakantie this week in the Netherlands and I used this time to visit family in the UK for a few days. A well-deserved and enjoyable break but it wasn't totally spent out of the office. I've been looking for a suitable full-time role for the last few months and was very pleased this week to finally secure an exciting challenge in technical product management shaping Azure infrastructure for a large European client. More on that in the future but for the moment here are some interesting pieces from this week's news.
Simon Wardley is going to map Large Language Models (LLM) space (i.e. ChatGPT DALL-E) over the next few weeks and is looking for participants. This could be a very useful exercise in both learning more about LLM as well as more about Wardley Mapping. I'm guessing some prior LLM knowledge would be helpful. Follow this twitter thread for more details and when there's a link to the session I'll share that. I'm always looking for ways to employ Wardley Mapping for strategy and this sounds like a really interesting subject.
Also this week some noise (not all positive) around Google's new framework Service Weaver. From the website:
We are excited to introduce Service Weaver, an open source framework for building and deploying distributed applications. Service Weaver allows you to write your application as a modular monolith and deploy it as a set of microservices.
At the core of Service Weaver, it claims that you can deploy locally or in a distributed architecture using the same markup (TOML) and abstracting away network effects. Bold claims and it's probably fair to say that it's launch has caused a titter of derision on twitter comparing this to other failed attempts at doing exactly the same such as Java Network Invocation and CORBA and even gRPC.
I'll also leave you with this thought:
"Is it more important to talk a good game or to play a good game?"
Have a great weekend!
-- Richard
Developer Productivity is Not a Helpful Label
Published on March 1, 2023
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As software developers, we love to label things. In fact, we believe that labelling things well is vital. This approach works for things we need to define and share in software – variables, classes, components, database tables etc. They need to be well-named in order to convey meaning to future selves and others when it… Read More »Developer Productivity is Not a Helpful Label
Human DevOps
by Richard Bown
Join my newsletter for regular views and news about doing effective, essential human DevOps engineering. I dive into the human factors that make successful DevOps organizations and the teams and platforms at the heart of your socio-technical systems. From leadership to team setup, maximizing performance, tools and techniques.
It's notable how trends take a long time to get moving, and suddenly, they seem everywhere. For the last month or so, I've been working for the Team Topologies organisation, helping them gather some knowledge about applying their ideas and techniques across the industry. I've been talking to agile and DevOps practitioners, consultants, and coaches, people who are using techniques in organisations to make them more humane, to make them more pleasant places to work, and to improve the flow of...
A couple of weeks ago, I ran the Amstelveen Marathon in support of Suicide Prevention NL. It's the first marathon I've attempted in over 12 years and my fifth overall. My fastest time ever was 3 hours 46 minutes. This time, I hoped to complete it in under 4 hours 30 minutes. I figured that with decent training, including some strength training, I'd be able to manage this okay. However, I really learned an important lesson on the day. I eventually completed it in an undistinguished time of 4...
FastFlow meetup #3 at TeamRockStars IT in Amsterdam Last Thursday night we hosted the third Fast Flow NL meetup in Amsterdam. A small but vibrant group of practitioners shared their ideas and passions about how teams get better together and how architecture finds a way. More than that, we had a lot of fun and laughter and we shared a lot of war stories.Afterwards during mingling this quote for me stood out: "I love being in a room where you can say 'mob programming' and everyone is nodding...