imiell While writing a post on practical shell patterns I had a couple of patterns that used grep commands. I had to drop those patterns from the post, though, because as soon as I thought about them I got lost in all the grep flags I wanted to talk about. I realised grep deserved its own … Read more
I spent 20 years slaving away at companies doing development, maintenance, troubleshooting, architecture, management, and whatever else needed doing. For all those years I was a permanent hire, working on technology from within. I still work at companies doing similar things, but now I’m not a permie. I’m a consultant working for a ‘Cloud Native’ … Read more
Over the decades I’ve been using the shell, there are thousands of reusable patterns I’ve picked up from looking over others’ shoulders and googling. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten about 95% of them. So here, I list many of the patterns I actually use often enough to be able to remember. If you want to get them … Read more
Working as a consultant in helping clients to change the way they work, I often struggle to explain to them how the way they usually attack problems is not always appropriate to the situation they’ve brought us in to help with. They might be a start-up that’s always taken an ad-hoc, JFDI approach that is … Read more
Previously, I wrote about how software companies cultural challenges can be traced back to how money flows through it, using the example of an ‘accidental product’ B2B type of business that tries to go from project to product. In this article, I want to extend that ‘cultural economics’ thinking to the subject of Agility. An … Read more
If you’ve ever spent ages waiting for an Ansible playbook to get through a bunch of tasks so yours can be tested, then this article is for you. Ansible can be pretty tedious to debug and obscure to develop at times (“What’s the array I need to access the IP address on the en2 interface … Read more
Intro This post walks through a ‘hello world’ GitOps example I use to demonstrate key GitOps principles. If you’re not aware, GitOps is a term coined in 2017 to encapsulate certain engineering principles that were becoming more common with the advent of recent tooling in the area of software deployment and maintenace. If you want … Read more
tl;dr – ‘Money Flows Rule Everything Around Me’ When talking about IT transformation, we often we often talk about ‘culture’ being the problem in making change, but why stop there? If we take a ‘5 whys‘ approach, then we should go deeper. So, where can we go from ‘culture’? Here I suggest we should consider … Read more
You’re a few years into your tenure as CEO of a Vandelay Industries, a behemoth in the Transpondsting space that’s existed for many decades. The Real Strategy You could really use the share price to go up soon so you can and sell your shares at the optimal point before fortune’s wheel turns and the … Read more
How many times have you sat there trying to work through a technical problem, and thought: Is it OK if I interrupt someone else to get them to help me? Pretty much every engineer ever Since I work with companies that are in the process of moving to Cloud Native technologies, there is often a … Read more