Posts by Category

software

Keeping a Bragdoc

4 minute read

At the beginning of each year, I spend a considerable amount of time speaking and advising colleagues and peers on the topic of goals and ambitions. Regardl...

Buffer your Sprints

2 minute read

My team has been successfully delivering software to our stakeholders using the Scrum framework. The fixed duration sprints and detectable/measurable velocit...

Jira Dashboards for an Agile Project

2 minute read

Jira dashboards are a useful way to take a quick peak into a project to get a feel for their state and health. Think of them as an at-a-glance healthcheck.

EC2’s new vCPU-based on-demand limits

1 minute read

In an effort to simplify the ec2 limit management experience, AWS recently announced that it was moving on-demand EC2 instance limits away from the existing ...

Reserving Amazon RDS resources

2 minute read

Reserved RDS instances (RIs) can be used to reserve a resource for a one year or a three term in exchange for a billing discount - a sizeable discount compa...

Test-driven provisioning with Chef

2 minute read

Chef is a killer tool for automating and testing your software stack. In this post I’d like to demonstrate our method of TDD’ing our infrastructure.

Downgrading a PECL extension

less than 1 minute read

I recently upgraded the Mongo PECL extension that a project depended upon, only to get hit with a load of Segfaults on OSX. I had used the pecl upgrade mongo...

Apache redirect to SSL

less than 1 minute read

This is something I can never remember, and keep having to Google.

Supply arguments to a rake task

less than 1 minute read

Whilst working on a recent project, I wanted to create a rake task that would send a curl request to a particular url. It was a pain to keep changing the re...

li3_airbrake - Lithium Airbrake plugin

less than 1 minute read

I recently wrote a plugin for Lithium that reports application errors to the awesome Airbrake.io service. I’ve been writing code for various Airbrake project...

Installing rbenv on OSX / ZSH

less than 1 minute read

I recently switched from using rvm to using rbenv for managing different ruby versions. The install is relatively straightforward, but a few caveats when usi...

JavaScript instanceof vs typeof

less than 1 minute read

I’ve been writing JavaScript for quite some time, but only recently came across instanceof, typeof on the otherhand I’ve always been aware of.

First steps with CoffeeScript

less than 1 minute read

I’ve been intending to use CoffeeScript for ages now. Rails adopting it was the kick up the arse I needed to go and learn it. I got a copy of CoffeeScript as...

Some VIm tips for navigation

1 minute read

VIm is my primary editor,.. actually, scratch that, my only editor. I spend most of my awake time in terminals writing code and over the years I’ve found VIm...

Building your new CentOS box

2 minute read

I tend to use Dediserve for my VPS solutions, and anytime I create a new box with them, I generally build it the same way. Most of the steps I’ve picked up a...

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reading

Mental Models

3 minute read

I recently read The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts, and took some notes along the way.

On Writing Well - Principles

2 minute read

I recently read On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. In this book, the author provides seven principles that can be used to write great non-fiction. These ...

Limitless

less than 1 minute read

Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a ...

Psychological Safety

4 minute read

Notes and learnings from the fearless organization, and some surrounding resources.

The Body - A Guide For Occupants

2 minute read

I am currently reading The Body: A Guide For Occupants by Bill Bryson. This is my first Bryson book, and although I am only about half of the way through, i...

The four states of a team

less than 1 minute read

Identified by Will Larson in An Elegant Puzzle, a team can be viewed as residing within one of four states.

Factfulness

1 minute read

Some notes from Factfulness (Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think).

Atomic Habits

3 minute read

Some notes and observations from Atomic Habits, by James Clear.

Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns

1 minute read

I was recently asked by a friend about which programming books I’ve found most useful over the years. I’ve read a lot of software development books but one o...

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agile

Using Kanban to Surface Problems

12 minute read

Background to Kanban Kanban has its origins in Japan, in a Toyota factory. It was developed in response to Toyota’s poor performance relative to their Americ...

Buffer your Sprints

2 minute read

My team has been successfully delivering software to our stakeholders using the Scrum framework. The fixed duration sprints and detectable/measurable velocit...

Jira Dashboards for an Agile Project

2 minute read

Jira dashboards are a useful way to take a quick peak into a project to get a feel for their state and health. Think of them as an at-a-glance healthcheck.

Do Just One Thing

1 minute read

A short post on the merits of doing just one thing at a time, extracted mostly from Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum book, and some supporting / referenced materials.

Effective Kanban standups

1 minute read

Some thoughts on making the most of your daily standups. These tips were extracted from Manning’s Kanban In Action which I would recommend for all teams who...

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writing

The Goal - Notes

2 minute read

I recently read the graphic novel edition of The Goal - a well-regarded management novel. The story revolves around the plant manager and his team, who, with...

Reskilling in the Age of AI - Notes

2 minute read

The most recent issue (September - October) of Harvard Business Review contained an interesting piece on reskilling. The article discusses how the rapid acc...

Recent Writings

less than 1 minute read

Cross-posting some recent articles that I wrote for the Zalando Engineering Blog.

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aws

Using S3 Lifecycle Policies

3 minute read

Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3 as we know it, is a managed service for object storage. It is used to store all sorts of data, such as images, videos, a...

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infrastructure

CloudFormation and StackMaster (part 2)

2 minute read

In part one of the series, we looked at using CloudFormation to codify your AWS infrastructure. I concluded with mentioning some painpoints that you might en...

CloudFormation and StackMaster (part 1)

5 minute read

As part of some recent infrastructure upgrades, I’ve been spending quite some time in the land of CloudFormation. If you’re unfamiliar with CloudFormation, i...

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personal

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learning

Feedback Templates - SBIN vs COIN

1 minute read

Some notes on two different feedback templates, and my 2c on when to opt for one over the other. Almost identical, they differ only on how the stage is opene...

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hiring

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career

Goal-setting

2 minute read

End of year. Goal-setting season is upon us. A lot of people see this as little more than a box-ticking exercise, but don’t fall into this trap. Goal-setting...

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bigdata

Databricks - An Introduction

1 minute read

I recently started learning about Databricks, a unified data analytics platform. The platform is large and this is a relatively new domain to me, so these ar...

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