One of the more memorable phrases of the DevOps movement is Amazon CTO Werner Vogel’s 2006 statement: ‘You build it, you run it’. As definitions of DevOps go, its clarity and measurability have made it foundational to DevOps transformations ever since. Like many DevOps principles it emphasises decentralisation and autonomy…

While many may proclaim that there’s one true way to distribute modern software, the reality is there is no single distribution model that suits every need. You may decide to ship software appliances in VMs and containers, utilise mobile app stores, build multi-tenant SaaS, open source your product, or provide…

Every year businesses across the UK refresh huge numbers of laptops for their employees. I’m calling on CIOs and CTOs across those businesses to take the following actions: 1. If you have any end-of-life laptops hanging around, clean them up and give them away to your local schools. 2. Take…

In my formative years as a CTO, back when Basecamp was called 37 signals, I was hugely influenced by their 2006 book Getting Real which professed the then radical idea that the best products have a clear identity and concept of who they’re designed for, rather than the most voluminous…

CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously once stood up to the suggestion that employees should communicate more with his retort “No, communication is terrible!”. I was reminded of this recently while reading the book Team Topologies which recommends that architectural and organisational designs should leverage the high-bandwidth communication that is…

All product engineering is not the same. That may seem like a simple statement, but software engineering is often equated to churning out lines of code, and if that’s the case why does it matter whether that code is for a mature product like SQL Monitor or our latest innovation…