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 8th September 2024 - How To Enjoy Software Engineering
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How was your summer? Does it feel like it's still happening, or are you already back in the thick of things? It's been a bit of both for me over the last few weeks. I've been in and out of holiday mode. The weather is still hot, but the office is in action. Next week, I'm off to London, where I'll be attending the second edition of the Fast Flow Conference with the Team Topologies organisation and heading to SaaS CTO Conference to meet with tech leaders and find out what's got them worried and/or interested. If you missed my article about last year's Fast Flow conference, here's the write-up. I'm wondering how much GenAI will be discussed at these conferences. The continued rhetoric, especially around AI, is a little taxing. I don't believe any business is smart enough to know how to best deploy or take advantage of GenAI other than the vendors already selling it. It's now bundled into Microsoft contracts and forced into our desktops and into our ways of working through Co-Pilot integrations but still, aside from migration project successes, daily use seems almost non-existent. Increasingly, I feel that most consultants are falling into the same camp. There's a lot of froth being generated about it because a lot of money is being thrown at it, but a couple of years later, we're still waiting to see what sticks. For me, the best thing GenAI has produced so far is the real-time generation of Doom. This is no game engine; it is purely GenAI trained on Doom. Last week, I sent Part 1 of my novel Human Software to alpha readers to gather some early feedback. Over the next weeks and months, I'll polish it, still aiming for publication in January 2025. Watch this space for updates! See below for a few articles musing about the nature of consultancy, teams and Philip K. Dick's vacation! Have a great weekend! The Gift of HelplessnessPublished on August 26, 2024 Did Philip K. Dick ever take a vacation? From reading him you wouldn’t think he strayed far from his thoughts. On my vacation I just read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik. These are two classics of his pantheon. I had to ask myself, why had I waited so long to read any… Read More »The Gift of Helplessness
The Limitations of the One-Person ConsultancyPublished on September 5, 2024 In January 2022, I started writing a book about automation. Shortly afterwards, I set up a blog. Every day, I wrote about things that annoyed me about software development and about things that I thought would help me contribute to its improvement. This turned into reading every day about software development. This turned into writing… Read More »The Limitations of the One-Person Consultancy
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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...
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...