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.
Greg Wilson of Software Carpentry fame knows how to write a headline. His recent talk Cocaine and Conway's Law is a mine of brilliant ideas and books to add to your reading list. They talk invested me immediately through his excoriation of Mark Andreessen's "Techno Optimist Manifesto" as a part of the Peter Thiel/Elon Musk narrative - work harder and longer, fix all problems via tech. Conway's Law, for those who are unfamiliar is the implicit link between social organisation of a company and...
The Horizon Post Office Scandal is one of the biggest IT failures in recent times, directly responsible for thirteen of the wrongly accused taking their own lives after prosecutions were brought against them. There is a highly technical deep dive into the findings made by Computer Weekly in this incredible Corecursive podcast episode. It is worth a detailed listen if you want to understand how this could come about and what systemic failings caused it to be covered up for so long. Software...
Working in software you get to see some pretty stupid stuff. And I mean crazy, stupid stuff. Decisions that float down from on high from multiple disparate spheres of influence - sales teams, other business units or just vice-presidents with a Great New Idea[tm] or a pet project. The narrative goes a little like this - the important people get to make choices and us techies have to live with consequences them. Sometimes these decisions are on a whim, an industry hype, a desperate attempt to...