The balancing act Every day we have to deal with balancing opposing values. Recently I have been encountering some of these in what we call “Developer Experience(DX) initiatives”. If I would make an overly simplified statement on what I’d say the mission of DX is about, then it would read something like: :“Developer Experience enables developers to focus on building and shipping cools stuff effectively and efficiently by removing the distractions and friction involved. … read more »
AI Agents or “Agentic AI” Recently, “the age of Agentic AI” was announced to be upon us. The announcement provided a look into the near future. Agents in the form of autonomous actors, leveraging potentially many different conversational AI and LLMs to accomplish common tasks, are here to help us. The perspective is of course driven by the incentives for the large investors in the field of AI development. So let’s take a look on who this is going to help and what providers of actual value adding services can do to get their piece of the pie. … read more »
Introduction I’ve been fortunate to have obtained access to the private previews of Azure resource manager “Deployment stacks” early 2023. Now that the resource manager enhancement is general available it’s appropriate to share some of my initial experience with it. In this blog post I’ll try and explain how deployment stacks will improve working with Azure resource deployments and create a better story for managing the lifecycle of groups of resources. … read more »
Taking a walk End of last Month I took a walk, literally. I’ve walked from the outskirts of Porto to Santiago de Compostela as part of the Camino Portuguese. For me it was a walk of just about 200 kilometers that brings you across the Via Romana XIX (the old Roman road) to Santiago.
The nice thing about walking on average about 25 kilometer a day is that it’s a simple life, that most importantly allows you to clear your mind. … read more »
This is about people in the first place The past few weeks, the news has been littered with tech-industry lay-offs and the apparent need to “battening down the hatches” for the looming recession. My first thoughts are with the people involved and I’d like to express my sympathy for those who’ve been layed off. Especially those who’ve lost their job without consideration for the value they add, which seems random, unfair and a mistake from the leadership involved. … read more »
No more safe bets In the olden days there was a saying in our industry stating something along the lines of: “You don’t get fired for buying IBM”. This pointed to the then well established compute services IBM had on offer that provided a good fit for the compute problems at that time. Since most software originated from one vendor, integration was fairly straight forward or even by default provided, although proprietary standards were used. … read more »
A bit of Feynman to start Over the course of a few years, well maybe a decade or so I came to appreciate the way to learn something is to teach it. As Feynman stated: “If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it”. With Wardley maps this seems to be the case as well. So to build up my understanding I had to immerse myself and dive deep into the subject matter, not just reading but doing. … read more »
The promise The promise or dreamland many CTOs have alluded to is leaning on the famous quote by Donovan Brown:
“The union of people, process and products to enable the continuous delivery of value to our end users”.
There is a lot to digest here.
As I interpret this, to me it tells me about a harmonious way of working, where everyone involved in delivering high quality software at speed, aligns themselves to best serve the need of the end user. … read more »
Sidney Dekker; Scientist, aviator & story teller A couple of years ago during the 2017 DevOps Enterprise Summit professor Sidney Dekker took the stage. I was intrigued by the title of his talk : “The pursuit of success & drifting into failure”. He unveiled himself as scientist and an engaging story teller, who’s written a lot of books and made a movie. Through his scientific understanding of the World, he is able to distill essential messages from the field of safety science and convey these in layman’s terms. … read more »
Bicep language Late 2020 I got acquainted with the Bicep language when it was announced as “ready for production” with version 0.3. Immediately I started using it for a job at a customer and off the bat found the experience very pleasant. I was amazed at the ease and rate at which I could produce complex resource configurations.
Workshop Over the past year I have given a few workshops for both colleagues at Microsoft and some of our customers to introduce bicep into their lives. … read more »
