Tom Clark

Just the usual morning chat with your technical co-founder Ben 😆 Things are moving fast in SetSeed land, it’s crazy. Making it fun too, otherwise what’s the point eh. Especially with customer requests coming in fast, rapid development, testing Voyager, AWS, Azure etc all at once, migrations, stack scripts, multiple backup systems, cybersecurity etc etc. Awhile back I was actually afraid of success, as it felt uncontrollable. Guess what, in a way it is! But embracing the uncomfortable is crucial to growth. Be like the cicada; get a bit noisy and keep shedding the old you. P.S. SSL simulation is a nifty trick when preparing to migrate customers.

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Leading Cross-Org Tech Reviews Josie has written a great post about driving a cross-org multi-team tech review practice. It's very focussed, as only senior principal-level engineers are usually tasked with those projects. I do think that org leaders as well as senior engineers will benefit from reading the article and adopting the best practices described there. It's also an excellent example of how to scale one person's efforts across multiple team, and thus applies to more than just tech surveys. Project planning, roadmaps, and tech explorations all have the common characteristic of standardized templates, parallel execution, and open questions. Read on here: https://lnkd.in/gX6bnXzq

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I do love a good stat. Of the 654,000 interactions on our live platform last week, 40,800 were over our API. If your supplier doesn't offer open APIs included in the base product, and you're thinking "meh maybe we don't need em" then you are stuck in legacy la la land. API's bring the efficiency and interaction products need in a modern adaptive platform. That 1992 CSV FTP Ping Pong you are pretending works fine will bite you on the behind one day. If you'd like to learn more about how Rubixx interacts with third party systems, slide in my DMs or ask one of our clients who used to have whatever you have now.

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Waterford Tech Meetup part 2 (September 24) with Richard Rodger from Voxgig talking Microsevices - 10 years doing it wrong ;). In the end lego components are where it's at. Unix pipe commands! Plug things together. the journey... node > javascript monolith > microservices to survive > laptop melting due to too many services running over http > same language services > components running in the same process Easier to use a mono repo rather than one repo per microservice. Polyglot Services -Help! Stick to writing your system in one language. Web servers, Web servers - one transport to rule them all *** You must use an abstraction layer around sending messages. *** Implicit architecture - need a way to declare your system. Architecture as code. See how the system works. e.g. yaml, json. passing these documents around * business logic is in the doc * summary ======== components separate bound - 1 thing well extend - general first, then specifics compose - microservices === modular monolith

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OK, let's talk about Platform Engineering. Good grief. Platforming is a topic that has grown into a life of its own in tech, and not in a good way. I'm going to row against the current. Platform teams are an anti-pattern. If your developers don't know how to properly provision and maintain infrastructure that is both supportable and minimizes cost and emissions, then you need better developers. Maintaining infrastructure in a consistent, supportable, optimized fashion does not require a team of people. A platform is not infrastructure nor is it the automation to maintain said infrastructure. A platform is a collection of APIs and messages that bind applications together. Again, this does not require a dedicated team of people. Platform teams are waste. Platform engineering is cover for justifying that waste. #platformengineering #platforms

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How do agency dev teams keep an eye on future trends in technology whilst delivering projects using established platforms? I find its a constant process of hunting for suitable opportunities where we can try new things safely without leaving a trail of unsupported legacy applications no one wants to touch... Here is a blog post I've written about why trying new things is important for our business as well as the developers in the team. https://lnkd.in/e-B48rQa

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"But we just need something simple..." 👀 Famous last words before a software project spirals out of control! Here's what REALLY needs to happen before you kick off that bespoke software project: Define your ACTUAL problem 🎯 Not just "we need an app" - but what's genuinely broken? What's costing you money? What's making your team curse under their breath? Map your current process 📝 Even the ugly parts. Especially the workarounds Including Sharon's special spreadsheet that somehow keeps everything running Think 5 years ahead 🔮 How fast are you growing? What might change? Who needs to use this system? Get real about hidden costs 💰 Ongoing maintenance. Training time. Integration headaches. Future changes. Support costs Talk to your ACTUAL users 🗣️ Because Karen in accounts does things differently than what your management thinks happens... trust me 😅 The truth? A good bespoke software project starts way before the first line of code. Skip these steps and you'll join the "it seemed simple at first" club - and trust me, nobody wants to be in that club! 🙈 Want to avoid the common pitfalls of custom software development? Let's chat! #SoftwareDevelopment #BusinessSoftware #CTO

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So you want to be the CTO? Then be honest - how many of these are 100% clear to you? What does a good CTO do day to day? What about an excellent one? What's the scope? How much time should they allocate to being hands on, managing the team, talking to the rest of the C-suite and the board? Do founders make good CTO? Should you hire internally or externally? 🤔 These are all harder to answer than you might initially think. Fortunately, we have some answers 🎉 I am joined by Alan Williamson, the author of "Think Like a CTO" (Manning Publications Co.), who spent over a decade being, working with, mentoring and training Chief Technology Officers, on episode 5 of HockeyStick Show. https://lnkd.in/ebnV9RCK

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8 times out of 10 a time boxed architectural spike will drive better decisions than workshops, RFCs and C4 diagrams. Whilst I value (very much) the things on the right, there is much higher proof from working software.

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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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I've recently finished the Dale Carnegie's book 'How to win friends and influence people... I find it an excellent and engaging read. Some things may be a little out of date, specifically from a British culture point of view, but the base idea is sound. Everybody wants to feel important, and this book is an excellent example of how to do just that, without lying, and avoiding those arguments that nobody will win. My next read is 'Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking' by Mehdi Hasan. This book at times tends to be the antithesis of Carnegie's book. However, it is just as engaging and insightful...2 Chapters down on this already. What are other peoples favourite books when coming to getting buy in / influencing people? #PersonalDevelopment #ProfessionalGrowth #BookRecommendations #DaleCarnegie #HowToWinFriends #InfluencePeople #MehdiHasan #PublicSpeaking #DebatingSkills #Influence #SelfImprovement #LeadershipSkills #CommunicationSkills #ReadingList

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Lunch time thought Whilst I love that git is a wonderful event sourced distributed ledger I also like that its criminal to rewrite commits because of this But I also hate that once again I committed something I wish I hadn't and now i have to go change the roles This to me smells of a design problem - how can we as an industry be exposing ourselves to this risk like this? There has to be a better way. There is a usability problem in here - I know better, but when going fast it is excruciatingly easy to miss something. I keep seeing console *commands* with *secure data* in them that should never be there. We have a system that has bad cohesion. The command changes as the API changes The secure data changes when the organisation changes But our API munge these to seperate reasons for change together into a single command. Should we start giving examples of things like that that depend upon env vars only? What do you think? #CI #ContinuousImprovement #XP #Security Sure pre-commit hooks are great - but when github actions are easy to edit inline we really need something to check for id like strings and really interrogate us wrt comitting them.

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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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Inspired by a video from Llewellyn Falco, a crucial realization struck me: technical coaching in software development is far from a zero-sum game. The industry desperately needs it, yet there's a shocking lack of awareness and understanding of its value. While I have many theories on how this disconnect arose, the pressing truth remains: the software industry needs more technical coaching. We need to acknowledge that a vast majority of developers (dare I say ALL!...including all reading this, sorry to break it to you), myself included, would benefit greatly from expert guidance and support from a technical coach to elevate our skills. The first step towards solving this problem is acknowledging its existence. #TechnicalCoaching #SoftwareDevelopment #DeveloperSkills #Mentorship #ContinuousImprovement #Leadership #TechIndustry #SoftwareEngineering #Coding #AgileCoaching #DevOps #TechnicalLeadership

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Interesting discussion with Dave Farley and Emily Bache. There are a lot of things that I agree with in it, however the one main sticking point that I have is that a true "engineer" in the more common incarnations, Mechanical, Civil, etc, require registration and licensing from a local state/district and/or governing body. I'd LOVE for programming to have such a system, but we currently don't. That's one reason why I settle with code craft and call myself a crafter. I agree it's not a perfect term, but to me its better than giving the false impression that there's a standard of skillset or understanding like other engineering disciplines. What do you think? https://lnkd.in/gXqmkden

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Nice to see my little article on the humane aspects of #TeamTopologies being picked up by this week's TechManagerWeekly from CTO Craft - thanks Andy Skipper Link to the TechManagerWeekly: https://lnkd.in/eDM823jx The newsletter includes results from a recent poll of senior engineering leaders regarding whether any of their team members are paid more. Echoes of the news this week where special advisor Sue Gray is being paid a salary of £170K which is £3K more than PM Kiers Starmer receives (excluding 'gifts' and other privileges) The results raise some interesting perspectives around hierarchies, status games, and resentment. Personally I have been in a situation as a leader where a team member was on a higher salary than I was but it didn't really bother me - the other person was technically way smarter than I was and brought a lot of value. Maybe it's because I often reflect on growing up as a kid when money was always a problem and I could never have imagined earning the kind of salaries that are commonplace in software engineering - I just appreciate having had the chance to break free money anxieties for most of my career (although they have returned a little since deciding to go all-in on getting Human-Centric Engineering off the ground). Feelings of jealousy, resentment, fear, and shame - they're often sparked by comparing salaries. I wonder if the underlying resentment is actually stronger than the 12% revealed by this survey?

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Me: "I'll give that public speaking thing a try in 2024." Also me: Getting stuck right into the big games apparently... I'll be talking at BigDataLdn this year. It's a solid mix of hype and anxiety, Hanxiety if you will! But mostly hype. #BigDataLDN #data #dataengineering #dataleadership

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