Mark Henwood

"The ability to use one software package and have people being involved throught the lifecycle..." - Zeban Kolen, Associate Director, Byondis We asked Zeban Kolen to describe what first drew Byondis to QuBAS and what made them feel that a change in software was the right choice for them. QuBAS is built to fit seamlessly into your wokflow at any stage of the bioassay lifecycle, providing all-in-one support from the earliest stages of development through to batch release for your next commercial product. This continuity means the benefits of QuBAS' powerful suite of features are brought to bear throghout a product's lifecycle, saving you resources at every stage. You can check out our full conversation with the team at Byondis here: https://buff.ly/3BW9cRS #biostatistics #bioassay #software #drugdevelopment #clinicaltrials #GxP #assay #potency #ELISA

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In case you missed it while prepping for Flag Day 🇺🇸 Happy State of Engineering Management Report Day happened this week! The annual thought leadership piece from Jellyfish has dropped. Hear from Engineering leaders, managers and frontline ICs .... we cover a range of topics that matter to great R&D leaders. Key Points: 1️⃣ Engineers are now strategic partners! 🙌 2️⃣ Burnout continues to be a challenge 😱 3️⃣ The talent shortage is spiking back up. 4️⃣ Many teams have embraced #AI 🧠 5️⃣ Others have legit concerns about AI ⁉ If #developerproductivity #genAI #engineeringexcellence are important to you .... have a read! (link in the Comments)

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Has anybody used or created a framework for assessing observability maturity across teams? I found a post from Honeycomb that was posted recently, but it’s quite leighweight and a work in progress. I’m interested in understanding how to quantify how far along on their observability journey teams are. The output would help identify those that need greater levels of support etc. Let me know 🙏🏼 #observability #monitoring #softwareengineering

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💡WHAT IS THE AVERAGE DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY SALARY (outside of London? ⤵ The purpose of this guide is to provide an extensive snapshot of salary bandings across different job titles & seniority levels. View guide: https://buff.ly/3YvT9CZ #techsalaries #developersalaries

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I've been deep-diving token naming conventions as I'm starting to re-architect our shipwright design system. I'm going to be spending some time working on this for Intermode - Software Consultancy for Logistics & Supply Chain. That being said, it's crazy how everyone approaches tokens differently. I know Romina Kavcic and some others are working on a standard ( Thank you! ). Now I'm starting with Figma variables, which I know are not tokens but I want to make sure that we have a good representation in our design tool for our team. I'll be documenting this effort here as I build things! Attached is another rough exploration to help set the vision. #design #designsystems

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If you’re an engineering leader, this report about the current state of tech has some great insights. It’s super fascinating to see what the current common themes are.

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Want to watch me build an app in 30 minutes at SXSW London? 👀 Only joking… sort of. The way we code and build apps is changing FAST, and I think its super important that engineers are keeping up with the most up to date workflows and tools. Tools like Copilot and Cursor are making development faster, smarter, and more accessible than ever. At SXSW London, I want to show you how to harness these tools for your own projects. My hands-on talk will explore the AI transforming app development and what it means for the future of our industry. But I need your vote to make it happen. ➡️ Sign up for a SXSW voting account and hit the heart on my session page here: https://lnkd.in/eRmSSUnu

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I'm observing a team writing code as an ensemble without TDD. I am selfishly delighted in the confirmation of how valuable TDD is to me as I use it. The team is implementing a new function that's doing list of list manipulation and returning something. They are all over the place with naming things, creating objects, streaming, mapping, flattening maps, return object, variables, naming...so many squirrels. Too many squirrels to even really focus on "what's the simplest first thing we could do?" TDD is so much more than writing a test first. It's a framework that helps me focus, prioritize, structure, and order my thoughts. Test Driven Development is an immensely helpful design and focus tool. I should also note, that I am beginning of working with this team and meeting them where they are. #codelife #devlife #TDD #testdrivendevelopment #unittesting #designthinking #problemsolving #structuredthinking #focus #mindset #toomanysquirrels #codingchaos

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I'm pretty sure the engineer you just hired feels like a fraud - it's probably your fault. I've just published a new post on the Unblocked blog that looks at how we can shift our onboarding processes from "checklists" and "tasks" to approaches that better support developers when they have questions. The post includes a number of recommendations, and a look at how Unblocked can help. What do you think? Have you found other onboarding practices that have worked for your team? Check it out here:

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https://lnkd.in/g9g9FgFn This presentation from Clojure Conj 2024 encapsulates everything I love about the Clojure community. It’s worth a watch if you have any interest in the nuts and bolts of #datomic but bottom line up front: the nuBank team charged with stewardship of Datomic did the most Clojurist thing I’ve seen lately. They looked at the shape of the distributed Datomic architecture, noticed a congruence with time-sharing CPU architectures, and so went back to the foundational literature (1968!) where time-sharing systems were reduced to practice. Applying insights from this deep lore to the unique design tradeoffs of Datomic, they implemented _cache hinting_ for a distributed database, and demonstrate in the talk something like a 10x (not percent, multiple) throughput increase for a complex, real-world use case. And then they made it available for free. We’re very much looking forward to adopting 1.0.7180 at Centriq.

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📢 📢 📢 The electorate has spoken! The next Workshop Wednesdays session (3 July) will be on Kotlin coroutines and concurrency. How much do you know about scopes, contexts and jobs? What really happens in a suspend function? I've updated the listing and you can sign up right now (https://lnkd.in/dNY6MCgG), it's free and takes place online. Thanks to all 209 of you for taking part in the vote! We'll do the other sessions soon too, the Bluetooth probably next, as that came second (and it's suuuuper fun). #androiddeveloper #kotlin

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Customers are leaving after 6 months... How do we solve it? By adding new features of course!!! Why not start by trying to understand why customers are actually leaving after 6 months and iterate on that? I saw once a real case of this. The product had potential, good enough to drive customers in, but existing features were half baked and not good enough in reality (and this was pretty obvious after using the product for a couple of months). This was driving customers out ~6 months after... but instead of fixing those half baked features, the mindset was to add new (sometimes crazy) features... And by the way, all this, plus the rush on those new features ended piling some extra tech debt, making tech teams slow, and adding to the problem that eventually ended killing the product. Do one thing... do it really well is a good mantra for these cases.

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How do mergers and acquisitions affect operational delivery? What do ops people need to be aware of to pre-empt the challenges? What do those acquiring most want from ops? We'll be discussing all this and more with the fabulous Max Fellows  of allpoints tomorrow in the nest #OpsNesters See you at midday tomorrow! #LetsTalk #EnablingBrilliance #EventOperations #OpsExec #OpsManager #HeadOfOps #OpsProfs

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Tomorrow, allpoints leader Max Fellows is chatting with The Ops Nest on Mergers & Acquisitions. Max will discuss the current market challenges (we are seeing quite a bit of funk!), which present both challenges and opportunities. As businesses navigate this uncertain landscape, we see a significant rise in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). For senior leaders, staying informed and adaptable is crucial. M&A can expand market reach and capabilities, offering a competitive edge and leading to streamlined operations and cost savings. Understanding M&A drivers is essential for strategic planning, and identifying risks and opportunities aids informed decision-making. Successful post-merger integration is key to realising benefits. Staying ahead of these trends is pivotal for steering your business through these times. We hope to see you there! #BusinessStrategy #MandA #Leadership #MarketTrends #BusinessGrowth

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If you want to become a great software engineer... you might need to start doing your housework Lots of good thoughts in this talk bringing many ideas I couldn’t articulate front and center Technical Debt is not a cause but the effect of Technical Neglect. You can’t focus on everything, to focus is to attend to one thing exclusively. And therefore neglect / not attend to something else. In much the same way that when we cook to eat we make a mess that needs cleaning, so to does the act of building require tidying up 🧹. Working in a code base is not free unless your Middle Eastern mom/wife bless her soul is cleaning up after you. Software is not kick-able and our mind attends to hard kick-able 🦵 things better than ideas. Neglect is the absence of something happening, you only notice it when it’s debt kicks you Maintenance is a requirement for physical things that wear and tear, our interaction with code with our limited attention causes us to changes things without attending to other things, that is the wear and tear of software Prioritizings new requirements over technical work is a bit of an oxymoron, what are new requirements made of pixie dust? It’s all technical work. Fixing bugs isn’t maintenance, you don’t fix bugs you find them they were already there. Tidying up is. In software we use metaphors, because we don't have matter. metaphors is our matter, but metaphors by definition is similar not exact. Legacy tells you where you spend your time on. If you’re a having a design meeting, the system you built has veto on your decisions References the book your Code is a Crime scene When we're writing new code we have skill issues, we don't know how it should look like, we write what the tutorial looks like, so we incurs some debt, that's fine, we're borrowing, the problem is if we neglect. So why do we neglect, well in analogy to tech debt it would be the equivalent of not having a payment plan. The problem is unmanaged technical debt we could have a payment plan, but that's the managed technical debt, we may have an unmanaged technical debt problem, parts that are not in the payment plan The reason why software engineering has a tech debt neglect problem is because it's composed of people who don't like to do their housework.

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Nice to see my little article on 'Joyful Work' being picked up by this week's CTO Craft Newsletter: https://lnkd.in/eymsf8J2 This has been one of those articles that seemed to hit the right spot with people, both inside software engineering and the workplace in general. We know deep down that applying our craft, our mastery in a domain that interests us - making a contribution to the world at large with the use of our skills and labour - should be an intrinsically rewarding and 'joyful' activity. Yet in the workplace, we rarely talk about optimising for 'joy'. It's almost taboo as if work should be a burden, a duty of suffering to endure. The article has triggered lots of conversations with people so it is clearly something we care about. I believe the creating the conditions for the emergence of 'joyful work' ultimately leads to 'joyful customers'. As per the words of Charity Majors that I frequently find myself repeating: "I’ve never seen the happiness of your engineering team and the happiness of your users significantly diverge. I’ve never seen a team of absolutely miserable engineers creating a product that delights their users. And I’ve never seen a company with absolutely miserable users, where their engineers enjoyed their work." Check out the article on our substack: https://lnkd.in/eH7a6aP8

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What hundreds of cloud migrations have taught us 💭 From cost optimisation, data integration, compliance hurdles, infrastructure redesigns, and just about every coffee shop in London - we've earned our stripes. Each project has honed our expertise, and if there's one thing we’ve learned along the way, it's that experience is best shared. If you're ready to tackle your next challenge, let’s chat about how we can support your business with the insights we've gained 👉 adroitcc.io #adroit #cloud #devops #data #migration #experience

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If you want to see what #Clojure brings to the table, you should follow this series by Kapil Reddy. My firm belief, when it comes to programming languages, is to learn those which add a new perspective and change the way you think about code. Clojure most definitely does that. What's your list of languages to learn which change the way you think and make you better? Share in the comments!

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Your dev team is under resourced Spoiler - it always will be Don't get trapped thinking if you just had two more (or fifty more) devs you'd be able to work through the backlog and get ahead. The problem is that teams try and filter and prioritise *down stream* on outputs. 100's of outputs. Try filtering and prioritising *up stream* on strategic outcomes that matter to the business (and across the business).

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