Loving Legacy

What is a platform? How does one appear and what do you do with it when you have one?

Exploring the line between planned organisational change and operational overhead. Overview of the state of platforms and introduction to Team Topologies concepts around Team API, Thinnest Viable Platform and Conway's Law.

Review of the talk I gave at the DevOops meetup in Amsterdam, November 22nd 2023.

Slides are here:

https://speakerdeck.com/bownie/that-one-script-you-wrote-is-now-a-platform

Youtube is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxf8LPTr6tc

More...

To kick off a new season, I start with a deep dive into the QUEST framework-which-isn't-a-framework. QUEST is a mnemonic that helps you remember essential software delivery tasks. This previews my upcoming "We Are Developers" conference talk in Berlin 2023.

In this episode, I take a view on the Agile Manifesto, the 5 Ideals from the Unicorn Project as well as John Romero's 10 Programming Principles and rewrite them, group them and then provide you with a way to remember how to apply them (and what they mean) every single day whether in your team, for your teams, or your...

Do you hate legacy or do you love it? Do you accept it or do you want to stamp it out? This time I talk to Nico Krijnen (Lumunis) about the opportunities we have in our legacy codebases to understand our business better, the strategic use of new technologies to make important product improvements, the importance of collaboration and visualisation to create a shared vision of software architecture and our product no matter what state the codebase or architecture.

We discuss the meaning of legacy, what it is and when it appears, how to fix it, how...

We are bombarded with the need for business change - which means systems change. At the same time, we need to be faster, safer and more secure than ever. How can you learn to make software delivery effortless, and how can you use the best knowledge on the planet to help you?

In this episode, I introduce the best books on software and IT change in business and how I would deliver effortless change dependent on context. If you want to know where to start tackling legacy systems change, start here.

NOTES

Check...

I talk to Jonathan Hall about all things DevOps from small companies to large companies and where the customer fits in the often technical story of our code development and deployment.

How do you bring junior devs up to speed responsibly? How do we as an industry think of DevOps tooling and how much is too much? How and when should you automate?

We also talk about his love for Golang and how it makes life simpler for junior and senior devs alike - how he got into DevOps and what that means to him...

What does it mean to support, extend or even replace a monolith and should we even try? This time I explore the landscape as it is now - when we feel under pressure to "do microservices" yet we have something that works but is perhaps too much of a monolith for us to work with effectively.

This quote from the end of the episode perhaps sums it up:

"Emergent architecture is used for understanding and extending complex systems, which have arrived at their state through an unknown path."

NOTES

https://richardwbown...

I talk to Dani Grant, the CEO and co-founder of Jam about their browser-based bug reporting solution and how it improves the bug-fixing experience for all those involved in reporting, triage and development. We discuss what challenges that Jam has faced in growing their product to 15k users with a small team of just 7 people and what the future might look like.

We talk about Jira, enterprise bug tracking and continuous engineering improvement when it comes to technical debt. We talk about working as a start-up and the challenges it brings when it comes to legacy architectural...

Not all engineers are equally invested in understanding what our software is actually doing - should they be and why? Is building a successful software product more than just a technical exercise in observability? How do we get more insights into the business direction of our product? Can we only truly test performance in production and what does that look like?

I talk to Stephen Townsend from Squared Up and the Slight Reliability podcast, all about SLOs and SREs and observability platforms and patterns and trying to predict what our customers want in the future.

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I talk to Jacob Lafors about his company, Verifa, as well as their approach to engagements around platform engineering, CI/CD and how he provides a value stream mapping service to clients. We talk about developer platforms and turning the developer experience into an internal product.

NOTES

The blog where inspiration for this podcast episode came from:

https://verifa.io/blog/unlock-your-continuous-delivery-potential-vsm/

Team Topologies:

https://teamtopologies.com/

DORA Metrics:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-four-keys-to-measure-your-devops-performance

Getting Naked:

https://www...

It's 2023 and just like any year, your timeline is awash with good intentions and lists of things that you can do this year. You might even be writing a list - but what is the good of a list if you never look at it and it's too big to comprehend in the first place?

I use this episode to relaunch this channel as "Lovin' Legacy" - because I love legacy code and I'm not afraid to say it - and also to poke at the lists that the Agile Manifesto, John Romero and Gene Kim (and...