Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

Send us Fan Mail This episode centres on Chapter Five of the book "The Value Flywheel Effect," focusing on the North Star framework. We explain how this framework helps teams align their work with a clear, meaningful metric (North Star) and its related leading and lagging metrics.  North Star Framework Overview We explain the North Star framework, emphasising its use in helping teams coa...

Send us Fan Mail In this insightful discussion, we explore mapping techniques from Chapter 3 of our book The Value Flywheel Effect and their applications in organisations. Key topics include: Anatomy of a Worldly Map: Breaking down the components of a map, including visible, aware, and invisible items in the value chain. Mapping Teams and Tech Stacks: How mapping helps in identifying team roles an...

Send us Fan Mail Wardley mapping is a strategic tool to visualise the evolution of products or services. The two axes of a Wardley Map are visibility and evolutionary stage.  Products and technologies evolve through four stages:  Genesis,  Custom build,  Product or rental, and  Commodity or utility.  Understanding context and phase of adoption is crucial in the business world, especially with AI a...

Send us Fan Mail We discuss facilitating effective collaborative mapping workshops and creating Wardley maps for strategic planning in businesses. We look at the importance of creating a safe environment, effective facilitation techniques, and involving all stakeholders in the mapping process. We also highlight the benefits of embracing diversity and respecting different opinions. And we share var...

Send us Fan Mail Dave, Michael, and Mark discussed the application of Wardley Mapping in understanding movement and making strategic decisions. They share their experiences with the method, emphasising its ability to visualise and track changes in tech stacks and capabilities.  They also discussed the importance of context, user needs, and facilitating meaningful conversations through mapping.  Ad...

Send us Fan Mail The Value Flywheel Effect is a pattern seen in organisations where business strategy and technology strategy align, leading to more sales and growth. The hosts discuss the concept of the value flywheel effect, its origins, and how it applies to creating software for customers. Dave Anderson and Mark McCann discuss the four phases of the value flywheel process, with three principle...

Send us Fan Mail We discuss why we wrote 'The Value Flywheel Effect,' emphasising our desire to give back to the community and help others who have contributed to their success. We share our experiences and insights on navigating the cloud transformation journey, highlighting the importance of luck, collaboration, and upskilling in overcoming challenges. We also discuss modernising engin...

Send us Fan Mail AWS Serverless Developer Advocate Team news is breaking. We discuss this and the importance of community events and fostering a culture of curiosity and collaboration in the tech industry. We emphasise the value of attending events like ServerlessDays Belfast and looking outside one's own silo to drive enterprise transformation. We also discuss the significance of developer a...

Send us Fan Mail We use the Cynefin Framework in our cloud modernisation work.  Dave Snowden created the Cynefin framework. Cynefin, pronounced "ku-nev-in," is a Welsh word that translates as "place" or "habitat." However, it can also be used to describe the elements of our situation and personal history that influence our thoughts and decisions in ways we don't...

Send us Fan Mail ServerlessDays Belfast 2024. ServerlessDays Belfast is back at Titanic Hotel Belfast on Thursday 23rd May 2024 Our theme is 'Building Beyond Boundaries: ServerlessDays Belfast celebrates the spirit of Innovation'. Find out why you should come to the birthplace of Titanic and what you can expect from this year's ServerlessDays Belfast. From the 100-year-old Drawing O...

Send us Fan Mail The Software Development Lifecycle - how does it apply to modern cloud? We are kicking off this episode with the term modern SDLC. The software development lifecycle (SDLC) is changing. When you get into this new way of working, you start differently. It's no longer a straight waterfall/ABCD, or starting with an established system like SCRUM and iterating. So how do you get i...

Send us Fan Mail We talk about what we would like to see announced at this years AWS re:Invent 2023 looking at Observability, Generative AI, PartyRock, Developer Experience to name a few. Serverless CrAIc from The Serverless Edge Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge Follow us on LinkedIn Subscribe on YouTube 

Send us Fan Mail Team Engineering with SCORP - there are practices we do like SCORP, which is our agile way of doing well-architected in every sprint with teams. Our practices are connected to engineering excellence, looking at what you're doing and constantly improving. And HP (high performing engineering), as a way of capturing key metrics to define good engineering or architecture, and the...

Send us Fan Mail There were a few stories in the news about working remotely from another country. We talk about the pros and cons of working remotely versus returning to work. We work remotely and are globally distributed, but we've worked for many years in the office to, so we have experience of both to make a fair analysis. Serverless CrAIc from The Serverless Edge Check out our book The V...

Send us Fan Mail Developer Productivity and discussions on developers and productivity have never gone away. You heard people talking about this in the 80s and the idea of paying developers by lines of code. And it was even rubbished in the 80s as a foolish thing to do.  There's a famous story about developers removing bad code from the code base and having negative numbers by the end of the...

Send us Fan Mail How important is Resilience Hub, Chaos Testing and Well-Architected? We attended the AWS Resilience Day at the Titanic Hotel. We were sitting in the same room where the ill-fated Titanic was designed and drawn! We discuss what we learned. Including the tools and strategies that help software engineers build resilience that were not available for the Titanic engineers. And we talk...

Send us Fan Mail Bringing mapping to your org.  We are doing a wee series on Wardley Mapping, with some practical items. The last two episodes were: 'Wardley Mapping 101' and 'Can Wardley Maps Predict the Future?'. So I thought it would be good to answer a common question: 'That's a cool technique, but how would I do that in my work?'. If you follow Simon Wardley...

Send us Fan Mail Can Wardley Maps predict the future, is our topic this week. In our last episode, we talked about Wardley Mapping. We did a 101 last time, explaining the basics. One of the things that we say is that Wardley Mapping is a superpower that helps you predict the future. What do we mean by that? It's like a fortune teller. But it doesn't tell you when exactly something's...

Send us Fan Mail Wardley Mapping is a core part of our book: 'The Value Flywheel Effect'. And it's a topic that people always ask about it. It's a difficult thing to learn. We've spent many years thinking about it, stumbling around, and then practicing. So we figured we would do a quick series on Wardley Mapping. We have spent almost 10 years mapping, give or take. For me,...

Send us Fan Mail ServerlessDays Belfast was on the 28th of February. It's a volunteer, community, and not-for-profit event. We had a bunch of sponsors: AWS, Bazaarvoice, EverQuote, G-P, Instil and LibertyIT. Our organizers are me, Gillian Armstrong, Garth Gilmour, Peter Farrell, Julie Sherlock, and Treasa Anderson. We had 12 speakers, and over 260 attendees from over 40 companies. But most ex...

Send us Fan Mail We've been talking about AWS re:Invent over the last few episodes. But one thing that we haven't talked about is Serverless Espresso. Serverless Espresso is a pop up coffee shop that allows you to order coffee from your phone. In the Expo Hall at the AWS Summit, they have a Barista setup. And you walk up to a QR code with a screen in the background. So you scan the QR co...

Send us Fan Mail AWS, What's New?  We are post AWS re:Invent. To sum up, it was about the next generation of cloud focused on delivering value quickly by removing barriers to business adoption and enablement.  On Day 1 SiliconAngle published an article called " AWS chief Adam Selipsky hints at the next-gen cloud ". He looks at classic cloud versus next-gen cloud. Classic cloud is in...

Send us Fan Mail AWS reInvent announcements  In this episode we are talking about what we would like to see at AWS re:Invent.  What would you like to see? Serverless Services An increase to the enhancement and evolution of service development capabilities and the ecosystem in general. So more serverless services coming online for items that aren't serverless and iterating to be more serverles...

Send us Fan Mail It began with the forging of the Great Maps and Simon Wardley  We've been talking this week about Wardley mapping.  Where did you first hear about Wardley Mapping?  I first heard Simon Wardley talking at cloud conferences about early cloud. I remember an open source conference and a 20 minute video. When he presented it came across as common sense. Like, why would you do anyt...

Send us Fan Mail What is Engineering Excellence? Few companies say they don't want good engineering.  But they don't define what good looks like. And secondly,engineers are expected to write lots of code. For me, engineering excellence is not writing loads of code. It's about getting into code reliability, feedback loops and how well engineering is functioning. And how your team is...