I lived in London in 1997 when the Tony Blair "New Labour" government swept into power. It was a time of great hope and audacity. It felt like "we" could do anything, but then I was 25 years old and living in London, and indeed, anything did, in fact, feel possible because I was at the dawn of my career without responsibilities or the weight of history behind my thoughts and actions. So perhaps older and wiser, we are here. The UK has been (according to some) bitten down by 14 years of Tory misrule and a disastrous Brexit vote, and the country needs care. It certainly feels like a different country from 2007, when I left it, but then my context has changed. I'm more than double the age I was in 1997. My kids, all born in the UK, have grown up in the Netherlands. Whether it's the First-Past-The-Post electoral system of the UK and Proportional Representation in Europe, we see that both systems are capable of surprise. Labour winning a landslide in the UK with only 33% of the public vote and only 20% of the population having voted at all for them. In France today the threat of Le Pen's far right is being met by a centrist and left-wing challenge from Macron and Mélenchon. Politics has undoubtedly changed. Across the board in European elections, voter turnouts are down. People are simultaneously more informed and less interested than ever. Should this mean we should abandon caring about the processes which decide our futures? This week I discovered the work of Andrew Harmel-Law from Thoughtworks via a talk he gave called Power Structures and their Impact on Software. While we can aim to build our organisations to take into account social structures, ultimately, people are always going to move faster than policies or frameworks. In our engineering organisations, we need to think of ourselves firstly as humans and engineers and forget trying to see structure where there is none. Writing Software is a Political ActPublished on July 2, 2024 Do you like a rabbit hole? Everyone likes a rabbit hole. I went from Andrew Harmel-Law’s talk Power Structures and their Impact on Software to the idea that software is inherently political+ and found that Technology is Political in More Ways Than One. To paraphrase that article, which itself paraphrases Langdom Winner’s 1980 paper “Do… Read More »Writing Software is a Political Act
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DevOps at is the heart of modern software systems. In my regular newsletter, I dive into the human factors that make successful engineering organizations where teams and platforms thrive at the heart of your socio-technical systems. From leadership to team setup, maximizing performance, tools and techniques.
“Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration... Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.” – Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life You're receiving this because you subscribed to receive updates about "Human Software" or you're on my Human DevOps mailing list. The summer season is upon us. Originally I was aiming to have some early chapters of my debut novel "Human Software" available to...
It has not by any means been a good summer in the Netherlands. It's been very wet and the last few days have also been extremely windy. At work, on the streets and on the roads, there is a tension. I try to take the time to go out for a lunchtime walk at least a couple of times a week and took this photo last week during a gap in the rain. The Middelpolder And we head towards the summer break, make sure to take some time to relax before you face the serious business of relaxation. I'm taking...
Do you always want more? More opportunities, more recognition for your work, more advancement? Sometimes, it's just knowing more, solving problems, and being right. What do we do to ourselves as software engineers and programmers that makes us want to do more all the time? We want to know more, write more, read more and perhaps even present more. I was interacting with someone on LinkedIn this Friday, and it made me reflect on what I am doing now compared to what I did a year ago. A year ago,...