More recently I have found myself looking for a new position for a software engineering company in DE, Germany. This has brought about a number of new and interesting challenges; most particularly for this article the need to demonstrate my capacity as a professional software engineer.

The challenge when applying for work is attempting to showcase skills in such a way that demonstrates to future employers that I am a competent, solid investment to help improve their organisations and their teams and to demonstrate that I am capable of doing the work that I am say I am.

To that…

Hardly a revelatory notion and yet while I was sitting drinking my Sunday morning coffee the idea seemed to drive a needle directly toward the heart of organisational dysfunction, illustrating a set of nebulous and seemingly disconnected problems behind a singular easy to grasp notion.

One that I am unclear that will hold up and yet one that I feel is worth exploring literally.

The many and varied organisational dysfunctions

Organisations are not necessarily linearly predictable in their output and it can thus be difficult for an outsider to see whether a given organisation is “dysfunctional”, relatively speaking. …

Recently I had the chance to work with the at Global Fashion Group in Berlin to help them work on shared services across ventures such as the Iconic, Zalora, Dafiti and Lamoda. This business operates at several orders of magnitude more scale and has grown aggressively in its fairly short time to become among the the largest fashion companies in the world.

This has been an interesting experience and one that, on the whole, I am enjoying immensely. With the new job comes new technical challenges, one of which is the challenge of “scale”.

The platform pushes through an obscene…

Our world is hopelessly, hilariously complex. Both Thomas Thwaites in his quest to build a toaster[1] and AJ Jacobs in his quest to thank all the people responsible for his morning coffee[2] illustrate this complexity; it is essentially impossible to reason about how the world works together to produce the various miracles we experience on a day to day basis.

With software eating the world[3] we in the software engineering community are tasked with finding a way to represent this impossible complexity in our software ecosystem. …

There are a series of allegories that encapsulate the murkier, more confusing part about producing software — the human part:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — Peter Drucker¹

“Organizations which design systems …​ are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” — Melvin Conway²

Recently a team I have been working with has been evaluating and architecting a shift from a monolith to a microservice architecture with the goal of isolating domains of the business within their own failure boundaries and increasing the aggregate availability of all services.

This in an of itself…

Looking for a fuller version of this article with pretty syntax highlighted code and additional tips & advice? Check out the original on littleman.co.

Recently I have had the opportunity to join teams employing a number of different approaches to continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD):

1. Version Control: Scripts embedded in the git repository, executed as a result of git events
2. GUI: Scripts written and uploaded to a server, executed on arbitrary events (time, git hooks)
3. None: Scripts sitting on a bastion server, executed as required

In all cases the team had a set of reasons for employing the solution the…

Version control is one of the more fundamental pieces of software development. It allows developers to navigate through a projects history to understand who implemented each change, as well as why they did so. It is an invaluable tool for use while understanding any given issue.

littleman.co uses git as its version control tool of choice. git is the defacto standard of the software industry, having replaced Mercurial, Subversion and CVS. The majority of our development tools and our workflow builds on top of git primitives such as:

• patches
• branches
• tags

And so forth. That said git, for all its…

I have a fairly long history using Linux for a number of purposes. After being assigned Linux as a development machine while working with the team at Fontis a combination of curiosity and the need to urgently repair this development machine as a result of curiosity driven stick pokery meant that I learned a large amount of Linux trivia knowledge fairly quickly. I built further on this while helping set up Sitewards infrastructure tooling; a much more heterogeneous set of computers and providers but with a standard approach emerging built of Docker and Kubernetes.

The sum total of this experience…