Loving Legacy

In this special episode I say hello after two years in silence, and I share what has been going on in the meantime. I wrote a book. It's a novel. It's about how we treat each other at work, it's about families, friends, ambition, disappointment, mental health and the impact of 24/7/365 software culture and globalisation and AI on our workplace. In this short episode I introduce you to the reasons...

What is a platform? How does one appear and what do you do with it when you have one? Exploring the line between planned organisational change and operational overhead. Overview of the state of platforms and introduction to Team Topologies concepts around Team API, Thinnest Viable Platform and Conway's Law. Review of the talk I gave at the DevOops meetup in Amsterdam, November 22nd 2023. Slides ar...

To kick off a new season, I start with a deep dive into the QUEST framework-which-isn't-a-framework. QUEST is a mnemonic that helps you remember essential software delivery tasks. This previews my upcoming "We Are Developers" conference talk in Berlin 2023. In this episode, I take a view on the Agile Manifesto, the 5 Ideals from the Unicorn Project as well as John Romero's 10 Programming Principle...

Do you hate legacy or do you love it? Do you accept it or do you want to stamp it out? This time I talk to Nico Krijnen (Lumunis) about the opportunities we have in our legacy codebases to understand our business better, the strategic use of new technologies to make important product improvements, the importance of collaboration and visualisation to create a shared vision of software architecture...

We are bombarded with the need for business change - which means systems change. At the same time, we need to be faster, safer and more secure than ever. How can you learn to make software delivery effortless, and how can you use the best knowledge on the planet to help you? In this episode, I introduce the best books on software and IT change in business and how I would deliver effortless change...

I talk to Jonathan Hall about all things DevOps from small companies to large companies and where the customer fits in the often technical story of our code development and deployment. How do you bring junior devs up to speed responsibly? How do we as an industry think of DevOps tooling and how much is too much? How and when should you automate? We also talk about his love for Golang and how it ma...

What does it mean to support, extend or even replace a monolith and should we even try? This time I explore the landscape as it is now - when we feel under pressure to "do microservices" yet we have something that works but is perhaps too much of a monolith for us to work with effectively. This quote from the end of the episode perhaps sums it up: "Emergent architecture is used for understanding a...

I talk to Dani Grant, the CEO and co-founder of Jam about their browser-based bug reporting solution and how it improves the bug-fixing experience for all those involved in reporting, triage and development. We discuss what challenges that Jam has faced in growing their product to 15k users with a small team of just 7 people and what the future might look like. We talk about Jira, enterprise bug t...

Not all engineers are equally invested in understanding what our software is actually doing - should they be and why? Is building a successful software product more than just a technical exercise in observability? How do we get more insights into the business direction of our product? Can we only truly test performance in production and what does that look like? I talk to Stephen Townsend from Squ...

I talk to Jacob Lafors about his company, Verifa, as well as their approach to engagements around platform engineering, CI/CD and how he provides a value stream mapping service to clients. We talk about developer platforms and turning the developer experience into an internal product. NOTES The blog where inspiration for this podcast episode came from: https://verifa.io/blog/unlock-your-continuous...

It's 2023 and just like any year, your timeline is awash with good intentions and lists of things that you can do this year. You might even be writing a list - but what is the good of a list if you never look at it and it's too big to comprehend in the first place? I use this episode to relaunch this channel as "Lovin' Legacy" - because I love legacy code and I'm not afraid to say it - and also to...

Legacy and tech debt are a fact of life in all software. So how can we identify the major causes and try to limit them in our development process? This time I discuss the major causes of tech debt and put forward a way to deal with them at various levels in your organisation. Writing software is an intensely human activity and we'll deal with the factors that making writing perfect software next-t...

Before I read the book by Kent Beck I was just thinking - pesky tests what are they good for apart from getting in the way? What’s so good about Test Driven Development? But writing tests isn’t what test-driven development is about. It's actually about designing your code in a way that matches your expectations. It's a powerful technique that, when understood, will transform the way you write...

Why do we love to build new code when we have plenty of good software that already works? Is the platform language or framework legacy? Is it because we want to learn a new skill? Is it because we are just bored of supporting the old software?  I aim to persuade you that before you decide to rewrite even part of your application in a new language or framework, you can profit by making your ex...

Sparked by a short Twitter exchange, this time I investigate why a lot of CD implementations (that I've come across) often appear to be half-complete or just fail to achieve CD. What are the root drivers behind achieving CD and why do so many implementations fall short? Is it just ME? It's a hard subject and one that I've debated with quite a few people. This episode is an exploration of a few the...

What is legacy? What does it have to do with building new software? Why does it annoy us as software developers? Why does it worry us as business owners or product managers? Why do we ignore it as forward-lookers?  What’s so great about technology anyway that makes us do this? What exactly is legacy?  I believe that legacy software is not always the evil, boring thing that we believe it...

An increasing number of businesses are now actually (at least partially) also software businesses. Energy companies, financial giants, insurers, and retailers – all of them have significant in-house developer populations numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands. These companies commission, buy and even build their own software. And these are not small or insignificant efforts. They are huge...

I talk to Tom Kennes, sustainable cloud consultant and ambassador for the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA). We discuss how IT and software delivery can be more sustainable and what happens when Ronaldo uses Instagram. We also talked about the impact of programming language choice on carbon footprint, the amount of energy used when watching Netflix and how to right-size your cloud...

When was the last time you did a Minimal Viable Product that was actually minimal? How often do we get it right and truly focus on delivering something of value to the customer? On this week's podcast, I riff on the idea of how to get a true MVP, not only past the idea stage, but into production no matter what type of company you are. By looking at the constraints that we have in play at any one t...

In this episode we explore the way that technology, tools and architecture can affect the product that you are building. As engineers do we need to think more about product side? As product marketers what can we do to understand how the technology choice informs or limits our product possibilities? How do we deliver software in an open source project vs how do we deliver software in a corporate ba...

Making software is fun. Running software can be less fun. How do you do both and not go insane? How do you make sure you're not working all the time to keep your (virtual) baby up in the air? The same rules apply whether you're a startup, a scale-up, a corporate, an individual, an open source project contributor. You're part of your own support problem. This time I discuss what it's like to be a c...

Welcome to the Software Delivery Club . Every week, we explore different aspects of the business of delivering software into production. Talking to industry experts about how they get to keep their production software running, whether you build or buy, how they cope with new features and product changes, how they keep their customers satisfied while also keeping themselves and their engineers happ...

How do we manage change? Assessing urgency and what does it mean when no-one is owning a (technical) systems problem? I talk about this common problem with projects and systems and how we can resolve it, touching on Incident Management and Product Ownership. Secondly, I spend a few minutes talking about the book “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”. This is a classic text which describes in simple term...

EPISODE SUMMARY This week I talk about how to position your business through better systems. How to understand how important you are at the core of the message to your customers and how you can build a system of positioning that will allow you to play with marketing messages and land on what works best for you and your ideal client. What systems do you need to support your positioning and marketin...

EPISODE SUMMARY When you first get a taste for working in a company you think you can change the world. Eventually you realise that the world is just fine and it's you that needs to change - and sometimes this can take a long time. When you have a business and you want it to move quickly, grow and adapt, what things can you do to make sure you're maximising your opportunity? This week I talk about...