I have been having a lot of discussions recently about tooling to support continuous delivery and DevOps practices. There is an incredible and ever increasing array of tools available for these practices. Whilst a number of vendors have developed one-stop solutions or suites of integrated tools, many of the tools in the space tend to be tightly focused on addressing a particular problem. Unfortunatley this can be confusing and overwhelming, especially to people starting out, making it difficult to know where to start and which tools to consider. This can also lead to particular tools being used to solve problems where other types of tools may be better suited. It is therefore important to consider tools within the context of the broader ecosystem and understand the role each one plays and the specific goal or problem(s) they aim to address. With this in mind, I thought it might be useful to visualise the broader CD/DevOps tool landscape to provide some context around the available tools and how they each fit within it. ...

I, like many others, have been affected by the ongoing industrial dispute over Driver Only Operation (DOO) on Southern Railways. On some days this amounts to delayed or cancelled trains with extended journey times and the inconvenience of standing all the way into London and on others, like today, strikes leave no viable way of getting to work in London at all. There have been many attempts to measure and demonstrate the impact of the industrial action such as the use of the #todayimissed hashtag on Twitter/X (see below), a recent passenger survey conducted by The Association of British Commuters and even a tongue-in-cheek video game. Whilst certainly compelling, these have all largely been qualitative rather than quantitative. I have heard tales of people losing or missing out on jobs due to continued lateness or based on where they live and, more recently, quite a lot of people moving job or house so they avoid Southern Rail for their commute to/from work. This got me thinking and I started to wonder whether there was any correlation between the industrial action and property prices in the affected areas. ...

In enterprises there is often a strong desire to standardise. The reasoning is simple: if we are all doing things the same way, using the same technology, then we can simplify our operations, benefit from economies of scale and make our people more fungible. So by extension, not standardising means duplicated effort, resources and expenditure. But are things really this clear cut? Perhaps we should begin by thinking about the meaning of the word standardisation and understanding the alternatives. Wikipedia defines standardisation as: ...

During a previous job I spent a lot of time working with delivery teams on other continents, helping them develop software. I was lucky enough to visit them on several occassions for a week at a time, and whilst I was there made lots of progress working with the on-site developers. Unfortunatley I was not able to stay on-site for the duration of the project and so needed to find other ways of collaborating with the teams remotely from back in the UK. ...

In my last blog post, I looked at situational leadership and how different influencing styles and techniques can be effective in different contexts with people at different levels of maturity. ‘Push’ (directive) influencing techniques are more focused on “telling” whereas ‘Pull’ (non-directive) techniques tend to involve the use of questions and reflection to guide. One particular technique involving the use of questions to influence in this way is Socratic questioning. Socratic questioning is a practice adapted from the Socratic method to stimulate critical thinking. It involves systematic questioning to explore ideas, critically analyse logic and consider broader perspectives. It is frequently used in education and psychological therapy. ...

Traditionally people used to think leadership was an inherent quality and that individuals have their own distinct leadership style. In practice, each style has its own strengths and weaknesses, situations where it excels and others where it is less effective. Therefore, whilst it is natural to have a preferred style that one feels most comfortable with, a good leader should be able to adapt their style depending upon the situation or context, the team or individual being influenced and the task at hand. This is called Situational Leadership. ...

I am really enjoying programming in Google’s Go language (Golang for search engines) but very occasionally come across things that aren’t really possible, or considered idiomatic, in Go. Go is a very opinionated language which is a good thing as it keeps the language and tool chain very simple but also means if you need to do something unusual, it can sometimes feel like you are fighting the language. One example of this is developing plugins. ...

This is the start of my new blog. It is something I have been meaning to do for a long time but somehow never quite got around to. Part of the problem for me was choosing a blogging platform and tool chain - I was overwhelmed by the number of different options available. I know lots of people use platforms like Wordpress but I always liked the idea of static generators like Jekyll. ...