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Notes from Agile Cambridge 2024
I spent 3 days at Agile Cambridge conference in October 2024. Great range of sessions and attendees to spend time with, all based at Cambridge university – an ideal location to put you in a learning mood. I’ve had a few weeks to think it over, and now I’m ready to write this “What would
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Deliver Sessions: Back to school
Deliver Sessions meetup took a Summer break, then returned in September 2024 – this time, to Auto Trader‘s office in Tony Wilson Place. We had a range of speakers sharing what they’ve learned from trying out new things at work. The power of “I don’t know” Chris Burns (head of product) has been reflecting a lot
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Notes from Fast Flow Conf 2024
I went to London for Fast Flow Conf in September 2024. This had all kinds of ideas and experience reports related to Team Topologies, and was a great way to learn about how people are putting things into practice. Connecting ideas I’ve done a fair bit of reading / thinking about how to help supporting
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Avoiding the Boaty McBoatface problem
You might have heard the “Boaty McBoatface” story: In 2016, there was an online poll to name a new Antarctic research vessel. Members of the public could suggest names and vote for their favourites – and the overwhelming winner was “Boaty McBoatface”. The Natural Environmental Research Council decided not to go with the popular choice,
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A pair of podcast interviews
It’s very rare that I get asked to appear on a podcast – until recently, it had happened just once, about 5 years ago. Then, 2 came along at once! Both of these episodes got released in June 2024. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my parents about anything I write / appear
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Deliver Sessions: Starting something new
I’ve helped organise Deliver Sessions meetup for a few years, and now I try to write a few notes after each one so I remember all the good topics they cover. For this post, we’re trying something a bit different: part of this is a guest post from my co-organiser Chris Burns! In June 2024 we were
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Book look: Future babble, by Dan Gardner
I read “Future babble: Why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway” (Dan Gardner, 2010) when I was looking into a series of blog posts on “Minimum Viable Estimation”. There’s sometimes a view that the software industry in particular has problems with estimation – but this book has lots of evidence that predicting
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Blogging about blogging, just this once
Every blog ends up here at some point: blogging about the process of writing posts, about the tech setup that makes the blog work, about the way the blog is laid out and organised … I’m planning to mention that stuff just once, in this post, and then get back to the kind of things
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Notes from QCon London 2024
I spent 3 days at the QCon London conference, where I presented a talk about making change stick as part of Sophie Weston’s “How do teams really work” track. I’ve written a bit before about how useful I find putting a new talk together – it really helps me think through a topic and find