Thoughts on the Skill/Will Matrix
Why Context is King
Posts by Year
2024
The Goal - Notes
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...
2023
Reskilling in the Age of AI - Notes
The most recent issue (September - October) of Harvard Business Review contained an interesting piece on reskilling. The article discusses how the rapid acc...
The Lean Product Playbook - Notes
Some notes from a recent read of The Lean Product Playbook.
Recent Writings
Cross-posting some recent articles that I wrote for the Zalando Engineering Blog.
2022
Mentorships at Zalando (x-post)
Cross-posting an interview with Silicon Republic on the benefits of mentorships.
Mental Models
I recently read The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts, and took some notes along the way.
Keeping a Bragdoc
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...
Notes from Hiring Success
Notes from Hiring Success : How Visionary CEOs Compete for the Best Talent.
2021
Landing your first Software Engineering Role
Software Engineering is an incredibly rewarding and satisfying career choice. On a daily basis, you get to flex your creative muscles to solve complex probl...
On Writing Well - Principles
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 ...
Feedback Templates - SBIN vs COIN
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...
Reflecting on one year with Zalando
Today, February 17th, marks my one year anniversary with Zalando, and aptly, is a nice time to reflect on that year.
Limitless
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 ...
Exploring Diversity and Inclusion
Exploring D&I
2020
Using Kanban to Surface Problems
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...
Psychological Safety
Notes and learnings from the fearless organization, and some surrounding resources.
Buffer your Sprints
My team has been successfully delivering software to our stakeholders using the Scrum framework. The fixed duration sprints and detectable/measurable velocit...
Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart
Thirty True Things You Need To Know Now.
Jira Dashboards for an Agile Project
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.
Databricks - An Introduction
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...
Successful Handovers
Notes on taking over a software project from an existing team.
The Body - A Guide For Occupants
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...
Do Just One Thing
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.
A Look Back Over 2019
A look back at the last twelve months.
2019
CloudFront Adventures
Some notes from a recent CloudFront implementation.
Using S3 Lifecycle Policies
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...
Goal-setting
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...
Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Replacing a self-managed ‘ELK’ stack with ‘The Elastic Stack’, using Amazon’s Elasticsearch Service.
Effective Kanban standups
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...
EC2’s new vCPU-based on-demand limits
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 ...
Six destructive myths about technical hiring
Following a recent discussion with a friend about hiring engineers, I recommended that they read Building Great Software Engineering Teams by Josh Tyler. The...
Instance size flexibility for EC2 Reserved Instances
Reserved EC2 instances (RIs) can be used to reserve instance compute capacity for a fixed term, in exchange for a sizeable discount.
CloudFormation and StackMaster (part 2)
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)
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...
Reserving Amazon RDS resources
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...
The four states of a team
Identified by Will Larson in An Elegant Puzzle, a team can be viewed as residing within one of four states.
Factfulness
Some notes from Factfulness (Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think).
Rediscovering JavaScript
I am currently reading Rediscovering JavaScript.
Tainted canvases may not be exported
How to export a tainted HTML5 canvas to Base64.
Atomic Habits
Some notes and observations from Atomic Habits, by James Clear.
2018
Migrating a Jenkins job to Serverless
Describing some recent experiments in migrating small services from Jenkins to AWS Lambda.
Test-driven provisioning with Chef
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.
2015
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns
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...
2014
A ruby client for free tech books
If you’re not already using IT-Ebooks.info for sourcing ebooks, then you probably should be.
Downgrading a PECL extension
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...
2013
Stupidly simple jQuery plugin for Facebook login
Using Facebook to authenticate users for you application is nice for a number of reasons.
Ruby client for the Perfect Audience API
I recently wrote a Ruby gem called Perfecta, that wraps the Perfect Audience reporting API.
Apache redirect to SSL
This is something I can never remember, and keep having to Google.
Send batch requests to Graph API using Facebook’s PHP client
The PHP SDK provided by Facebook is quite good, though it lacks the ability to send batched requests. The reason for sending batched requests is that it allo...
Supply arguments to a rake task
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...
2012
li3_airbrake - Lithium Airbrake plugin
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...
Dynamically set li3 environment based on subdomain
I’ve mentioned before that our latest project in work, is built on Lithium. It aint no Rails, but its not bad for a PHP framework! ;)
Installing rbenv on OSX / ZSH
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
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.
Miscellaneous Lithium (li3) bits and bobs
In work, we recently started development on a new product to solve the problems with Facebook Promoted Posts.
Killing multiple process instances from the terminal
I sometimes have multiple instances of a process running, typically, worker scripts that are dealing with clearing out a backlog. From time to time, I’ll nee...
2011
First steps with CoffeeScript
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...
Using Node.JS, Express & MongoDB on Heroku
I’ve been playing with Node.JS and Express as of late, and earlier today I wanted to put a simple application that used MondogDB up on Heroku.
Automatically check PHP / Ruby syntax on file save
Automatically check PHP / Ruby syntax on file save
Some VIm tips for navigation
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...
Integration testing Devise with RSpec and Capybara
I use Rails quite a bit for development and recently noticed that my unit tests were quite indepth but that my integration tests were lacking. So I recently...
Building your new CentOS box
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...
From scraps and notes to Jekyll
I’m not usually one for writing, but over the last few months I find myself scribbling down lots of notes, usually just for documenting steps to do a particu...