Category: Musings
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Huge scale deployments
Deploying to 10 or 20 servers can be complicated. But what are some of the tools, tips and patterns for successfully deploying to 1,000s of servers around the world? Last month I participated in an online panel on the subject of Huge Scale Deployments, as part of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), a series of community panels about…
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Flatulent agile
Recipes I’ve been working with a number of larger, older organisations recently and it has really brought home to me the difference between the promise of a nimble, responsive teams and the reality of a sluggish, bureaucratic behemoth. Then, looking back over years of writings, posts, promises and dreams I see frequent repetitions of the phrase…
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Is the customer always right?
Today I’m in London for the first day of SPA 2015. I was early to the venue and I went to the registration desk to sign in. “What’s your name?” asked the receptionist. “Seb Rose” I replied. “No. You’re not registered” she said. After a few minutes of spelling out my name, and searching around…
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Entanglement (or there’s nothing new under the sun)
I’ve just read The Age of Entanglement : When Quantum Physics was Reborn by Louisa Gilder. It’s a tremendous book, looking at the interplay between great physicists over the whole of the 20th century. If you want to learn about quantum physics itself, this is probably not the book for you, but if a mix…
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Always Be Coding
Last night I finally got around to watching Erik Meijer’s keynote from last year’s Reaktor conference. It was called “One Hacker Way” and, while it contains much that is apocryphal – or at least wildly inaccurate – it scores over the older, more pedestrian type of keynote in two important ways: first it is highly contentious,…
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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
From http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/explore/reduce/: Three great ways YOU can eliminate waste and protect your environment! Waste, and how we choose to handle it, affects our world’s environment—that’s YOUR environment. The environment is everything around you including the air, water, land, plants, and man-made things. And since by now you probably know that you need a healthy environment for…
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Do you practice BDSA?
I get to visit a lot of teams. I talk to my peers about their experiences too. For every agile success story there seem to be a load of less happy outcomes. There are three common ways that I’ve seen agile ‘adoption’ go wrong, and they are: Bondage – “You can never change the business. That’s…
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Half a glass
Is this glass half empty or half full? There’s normally more than one way to interpret a situation, but we often forget that the situation itself may be under our control. I often find my clients have backed themselves into a corner by accepting an overly restrictive understanding of what they’re trying to achieve. They will tell…