Software systems rule our world. My regular newsletter explores the human factors that make software engineering so unique, so difficult, so important and all consuming.
The Human DevOps - Sunday 10th November - Being Human
|
The period after the summer holiday is always a busy one. What have you been up to? A lot of what has been on my mind is my mind. And not only my mind but the minds of those around me. There is an increasing neurodivergent component in my family, so for me, it's been really hard to think or read or write about anything else! Against this backdrop, I've been back to working as a DevOps engineer, writing Terraform, Python and Ansible and having design discussions. While I still enjoy it, I sometimes wish for more exciting work. The people I work with are great, making it bearable for the moment but there is still uncertainty in our futures. There is still a lot of uncertainty in the software world. Layoffs continue. I count myself lucky. It's better to have a job than not one, especially at this time of year. I've also been continuing to work on my novel, Human Software. It's also a blog now where I write about the writing process and track its development. With this focus on writing, on the self, family and the team, I find the actual creation of software itself increasingly unimportant. Consequently, I'm reconsidering this newsletter, my blog and what it means to my readers. My focus is exploring the human condition in the current time - in 2024. It's never been about software processes or engineering excellence but I have been writing about "what I know" so I've been expressing myself through that medium. I look back over the last almost three years of this newsletter, and I notice that it's changed a lot as I have changed and learned. I was initially writing about automation and how that helps us. Then, I thought I was writing about software design, DevOps and architecture. Then, I thought it was about the management process and how our organisations are built. But, all along, I was talking about people, about humans. About how we interact. About what we think. About how we grow. About how we love. These are all themes I am exploring in Human Software. So if you want to know what's going on with that - you can also one-click sign up for updates! An update about Human Software is scheduled for this afternoon. Thanks! When I return with the next instalment of this newsletter, I might have dropped the DevOps part from the name ;) Have a great Sunday! Self-Compassion on the Anxiety Boredom ThresholdPublished on November 2, 2024 Alongside my day job I’ve been making a concerted albeit slightly haphazard effort to build a consulting career over the last few years. This means having a blog (hi!), having an increasingly occasional newsletter, starting a podcast, posting on LinkedIn, making connections, reading books, reviewing them and being an enabled and activated member of a… Read More »Self-Compassion on the Anxiety Boredom Threshold
Humans Screw Up. Why Can’t Other Humans Accept This?Published on October 22, 2024 Do you know how many mistakes the average software engineer makes over their career? It’s a lot. In fact, it’s directly proportional to the number of things a software engineer does. The more you do, the more you screw up. That’s how it works. Pretending that somehow we are invincible as software engineers is just… Read More »Humans Screw Up. Why Can’t Other Humans Accept This?
Why I still love LegacyPublished on October 9, 2024 Almost three years ago I started a podcast without really knowing where it was going. The only thing I knew was that it was good to talk about things – to talk out loud about ideas. Because when we give voice to our ideas, they actually become real. They are not just banging around inside… Read More »Why I still love Legacy
|
The Human Software
Software systems rule our world. My regular newsletter explores the human factors that make software engineering so unique, so difficult, so important and all consuming.
The third working week of the year starts tomorrow, and, as Danny the Drug Dealer says in "Withnail and I", there are going to be a lot of refugees. The years take on familiar shapes when it comes to corporate whim. We have our budget-setting periods, our summer holidays, and perhaps even our closed or quiet periods around Christmas. Predictability, as comforting as it is, can be equally disquieting. Are we here again? As marketing guru Seth Godin says, your comfort zone is not the place to...
Did you know that Kate Bush was only 19 when she embarked on her first solo tour of the UK? Not only had she been writing music from a very young age but at that point she had been working on some of the songs on her first album "The Kick Inside" for more than four years. Clearly even at 19 she is a driven person and has been from a while - creating and forming the world around her as she goes - a force of nature. How do we choose to impose ourselves on the world? As we head to the end of...
September took me to London to attend a couple of conferences. The first was the Team Topologies-aligned Fast Flow conference , preceded by a workshop with the Team Topologies core team. I also popped into the Design Museum when I was in the area, an inspirational space if you're ever in London. The Design Museum in Kensington, London. As part of the work I do, I sometimes bump into like-minded folks. While I didn't catch up with them at Fast Flow Conf, a few days ago I enjoyed chatting with...