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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…
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Deliver Sessions: Same goals, different roles
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. In March 2024 we were hosted at Zühlke’s office in Piccadilly Basin, where we had 3 talks and plenty of time to discuss them. All the…
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Agile in the Ether, IRL: Hacking bureaucracy
This is the last post in a series about Agile in the Ether’s first in-person event. So far we’ve had notes on: For the final workshop, Jen Oliver chose a subject familiar to lots of us: What are the sources of too-much-bureaucracy where you work, what frustrations does that cause, and – most importantly –…