One thing the Army is good at is teaching you how to function under immense pressure, for extended periods. Speaking briefly about my credentials in this area, I’ve spent just under five years in the Army, nine months of which were in Afghanistan as part of a NATO mission with the New Zealand Defence Force. As with everything, there are folk out there with more experience than me, who have done it harder, for longer....
Digital Transformation, Digital Experience, Digital Thought Leader, Digital Coffee Table, Digital DevOps Team, Digital Dystopia Some of these things are not like the others. Have you heard the phrase ‘digital’ so many times it loses all meaning? Try saying it a hundred times and see if the word still sticks in your brain. If you’re like me, it’ll slide right away like a fried egg off a bald head. Now imagine baldy over there is your company....
Digital transformations don’t work. Everyone wants to talk about digital-led businesses. Every business is a software business, even when they aren’t, people will tell you. But the focus on big bang, project managed, change agent-driven initiatives tend to leave sour tastes in the mouths of long-standing staff. Naive technologists or agilists or product people for that matter exacerbate this when they perform the business strategy equivalent of the ‘seagull’. Discontent frequently morphs into outright opposition, and emotion becomes the dominant decision-making force rather than observation and planning....
How do you keep up to date with changes in technology? How do you get your startup off the ground from a technical standpoint? What can you do to build out your tools and processes in a sustainable, low risk way? Finding space for continual learning at work can be tough. If you, like me have a passion for technology but have transitioned away from a technical role and miss fiddling with technology on a daily basis, you might consider creating a lab at home to keep your skills sharp, and stay up to date on industry trends and best practice....
What do when you don’t know what to do? Even worse: What do you do when people are paying you to do things, and expect you to do things, but you don’t know what to do? Are you in a brand new domain? A brand new type of business or a completely new role? What about if you’re in a completely new industry? Having just started a new role, the pressure to deliver and deliver quickly can be quite daunting....
I build teams. I build teams good. Good teams that do well, and they also do good. Technical teams mainly, but I’m branching out. It’s good. That’s all well and good, but what is the point? The point is that good teams are rare. That is to say, a team that you can leave alone, with the trust that they can self-regulate, self-correct and grow without you is very difficult to find, such that the effort to grow one (if you can) is a far simpler thing by comparison....
My team at Healthlink have just finished a proof of concept around Continuous Delivery. Here’s the writeup, sanitised for the internet. Context We’re a Health IT company based out of New Zealand, and run an set of products that provide messaging integrations between Healthcare organisations across New Zealand and Australia. Our applications are a mixture of desktop and web service based, and we’re currently undergoing a massive change process from Waterfall to Agile and from a bespoke services company to a truly product focused company....
On Friday 30th September, a colleague and I spoke at Devops Days 2016 in Wellington. It was an awesome experience, and the first time I’ve spoken on technical and non-technical topics at an industry conference. The talk I gave is available on Speakerdeck. I’ve also embedded it below: I think that the one thing that I took away from Devops Days NZ 2016 was this. It’s very easy to get wrapped up in your own problems in this industry....
Casey Gerald is an amazing speaker. He spoke at Webstock about belief, and doubt. He spoke about how each time he became invested in a belief of something greater than himself, he was inevitably dissapointed. Each time he entered a different phase in his life, he believed in something new, and each time that belief was broken. He began to believe in doubt, he believed it might not be possible to believe in anything at all....
We started Overtime last year bemoaning the lack of social eSports being played in New Zealand, not fully understanding the reason behind that absence. Well, now we do. It’s really hard to do it properly. It takes a bunch of time, coordination, and passion. Fortunately we still have the passion, but unfortunately, our time has dried up. We won’t be running Season 2 this year. Instead, Troy and I will be spinning off the software we wrote to manage the first season, and working on that to the point where it’s a viable product in and of itself....