The Cloud space abounds in zealots, eager to peddle their One True Path: “Serverless is the future!”, “Kubernetes solves all your problems!”, and more breathless promises along those lines. The actual use cases to be addressed often take a back seat to ready-made “solutions” – which is why I felt it might be valuable to turn […]
Safety in Numbers?
‘Defendit numerus’ [there is safety in numbers] is the maxim of the foolish; ‘Deperdit numerus’ [there is ruin in numbers] of the wise. C.C. Colton (1820), quoted from Knuth Vol. 2 “You can only manage what you measure,” they say. Certainly metrics, when chosen well, can help immensely in structuring a situation, and in suggesting […]
Technical Debt and Inertia
There are different factors that can contribute to making software development on a product increasingly harder over time:
Useful debt, which you knowingly entered into for the purpose of time to market; careless debt which you incurred through lack of discipline in sloppy daily work; and cumulative inertia that is the result of successfully expanding your product over time.
“Hamburger Hill” Project Management
Hamburger Hill, for those who don’t know it, is a movie about an episode in the Vietnam War in which a particular hill of no discernible value is conquered at great cost, and then surrendered again by US forces. The troops call it Hamburger Hill to vividly illustrate the grinding they’ve gone through for essentially […]
Process Zealots
Ours, it would seem, is a time of growing zealotry. Instead of following a scientific path of hypothesis and validation, of stepwise improvement, and of picking the approach that best fits the task at hand, we get the promise of uniform salvation. In the abstract, a development process is a tool toward the end of […]
“And know the place for the first time”
Nowadays, of course, everybody is “agile”. Regardless of what they really do, everybody knows to wield the buzz word. It’s when they start talking about how fast agile methodologies are making them that you should furrow your brows. When you know exactly what you need, you can be very fast using many approaches, including the now […]
Beware the “elite engineer”
Let’s call him Jesse. Jesse was a pretty good developer, quick to get things working, and always up-to-date on new technologies. So he became the go-to-guy when something impressive was needed rapidly, for a demo or a trade show. Soon, Jesse was the “cool kid” working on the “cool stuff”, the startup CEO’s favorite and […]
The Virtues of Inconvenience
People behave differently when they believe their actions have no consequences. Not exactly a new insight; yet one that it is important to come back to every once in a while, since many of our corporate processes still neglect to sufficiently account for it. And we’re not talking about the criminally minded here, though certainly […]
Leaving the Stone Age
Many of us, myself included, were educated in what you may call the Stone Age: Deployments were supposed to be “solid as a rock”. Once something got set up, it was supposed to run for years – ideally without making a noise. There were good reasons for this approach: Significant up-front investment was required for […]
Cloud Essentials
At the start of this blog it seems appropriate to provide some foundational tenets on the nature of the cloud; a creed if you will: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Hardware is Software The core nature of the cloud is the API. Virtualization is, obviously, a key technology component – but the cloud […]
Cloud Musing 