Exploring the human factors that make software engineering so unique, so difficult, so important and all consuming. Learning to work with the systems, not against them.
The Human Software 269 - Development Complete
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Happy Sunday and Happy International Women's Day for yesterday. All socially or culturally significant milestones are accompanied by an excruciating number of tone-deaf, tokenistic LinkedIn engagement attempts and yesterday was certainly no exception. LinkedIn is a strange place indeed but it's my primary social engagement platform. Because I take what I think is fair to say an organisationally cynical but deeply humanistic view of life in tech, I find it fascinating to see the (lack of) engagement on some of my posts. For example, below, I call out how using more advanced technologies doesn't actually improve the quality of the software we deliver. This post gained much traction, but not many people engaged with it. I think this is because we are often in the thrall of new technology. We assume that new technology will fix our problems, and yet somehow, we don't hold it accountable when it fails to. Because as executives and leaders, sometimes our choices are restricted only to technology changes, which are political plays by companies that have a duty to their shareholders to sell products. And often, those shareholders are us. Careers are defined by picking what a popular vendor is pushing. AI is a great example, public cloud is another, big data is yet another. Buzzwords that move the needle a little in terms of what we do or how we do it in a technological sense but don't really make our lives working in or with technology that much better. They won't stop us from being woken by a pager call in the middle of the night. These are some of the major themes that I explore in "Human Software." Last week, I completed the development edits and sent the final chapters to my editor. Over the next month, I'll work on the feedback and start thinking about artwork as I head towards the final stages of preparing it for publication in September. Until next time, keep thinking critically about the reasons behind tech changes. Often, we're driving the change ourselves out of pure curiosity without really thinking about the human impact. Enjoy your Sunday. Development Edit CompletePublished on March 5, 2025 I’ve just sent the final chapters of my debut novel Human Software over to my editor. I’m aiming for publication in September ’25. I like to describe “Human Software” as “The Phoenix Project but A Bit More Evil”. I love the Phoenix Project; it’s one of my favourite books, and it inspired me to write… Development Edit Complete
How to Improve Development Speed using Ansible and Packer for AWSPublished on February 22, 2025 If you’re a jobbing SRE or DevOps engineer you’ll often be parachuted into someone else’s mess and have to make sense of it. A lot of the last ten years of public cloud work has been partial lift-and-shift to the public cloud, which entails a lot of ‘on-prem’ like work, i.e. we end up with… Read More »How to Improve Development Speed using Ansible and Packer for AWS
Game Developers Get the AI JittersPublished on February 22, 2025 A fascinating article in Wired into the continued and deepening backlash against generative AI in the creative industries. In particular, in game development, film and media, art, writing, and also of course bespoke, professional software development in any industry. The continued push by Microsoft and OpenAI and Amazon and Meta and everyone else with deep… Game Developers Get the AI Jitters
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The Human Engineer
Exploring the human factors that make software engineering so unique, so difficult, so important and all consuming. Learning to work with the systems, not against them.
Conference season hit Amsterdam last month with the global juggernaut that is Kubecon but I eschewed the noise of that particular enormous techie event and went instead to the writer-friendly event "Stories Unfold" at Amsterdam's OBA theatre. This was a very pleasant evening giving a selection of self-published and traditionally published authors a stage to share the stories behind their books and also highlighted a new compilation of short stories. The audience was very much made up of...
Twenty years ago I was living in Taunton in the South-West of the UK and travelling by car to work in Bournemouth to work for a big, famous American investment bank as a technical consultant. I'd been hired to be part of a helpdesk which was on-call to supply first line support to portfolio managers who were booking trades for their clients. But me being a techie, I was there to bring technical expertise and solutions to a team that was struggling. I aced the assignment. Providing a technical...
January is over. The longest month! I managed to get a break in Chamonix, nominally to do some skiing, but for the most part it was marvelling at the beauty of it all. The world around us. So, I'm in the alps taking a break from the uncertainty of the present and facing my own mortality on the gentlest slopes near Mont Blanc. It's wonderful being up there with friends, I feel very lucky, and I also don't feel any real need to push myself like I would have done in the older days. I went out...