Decide everything as late as possible, but not later.
Sometimes, I read an article, and some idea deeply resonates with me and makes a long lasting impression. It changes the way I approach some topic. Fred Brooks' essay "no silver bullet" was one of the very first article I read that had this effect. The concepts of esssential and accidental complexity are very powerfull, … Continue reading Some of My Favorite Articles
A main responsibility of management is to make sure that teams function well. This implies defining the adequate organisational structures and finding adequate people. The Boss Team Sometimes, the structure is easy. There's a boss and there are employees. The boss decides how the team should function, what should be done, who should do it, … Continue reading Team Structures
If you try to think about the last talk that you gave to a large audience, you might recall feeling a bit anxious standing in front of the audience. You might remember people looking at you and how the room looked like. This memory feels complete. Yet, you don't recall the actual faces of the … Continue reading Adventures in Memory
The key message of "Drive", from Daniel H. Pink, is that people are best engaged in a task when they understand the purpose of the job, they can develop the necessary mastery to realise the job, and they have sufficient autonomy to direct things their way. That's a very simple framework -- purpose, mastery, autonomy … Continue reading Drive
Things move fast in the IT industry. Half of the technologies I use today didn't exist ten years ago. There's a constant push to switch to new technologies. But when it comes to technologies, I'm kind of conservative. I like proven technologies. The thing that makes me conservative is that mastering a technology takes a … Continue reading Mastering New Technologies Takes Time
This book is about agile management as a way to conduct business -- not just software development. In the first chapters, the author presents agile management by characterizing it with three "laws": the law of the customer, the law of the small teams, and the law of the network. Roughly, I would sum them up … Continue reading The Age of Agile
Stuff Matters is a very nice little book about the materials that surround us. Organized in ten chapter, each tracing the history of a class of material (metal, paper, glass, plastics, chocolate, gels, graphene, concrete, ceramics, biomaterial), we get to better appreciate how much tinkering and research took place over centuries to discover all these … Continue reading Stuff Matters
Companies have traditionally organized software-related activites in three silos: Dev, Test/QA, Operations. The QA effort is realized after a long phase of development resulting in bug spikes and difficulties to plan the work for the development teams during this time. When companies were engineering software "piecewise" this was the only way. Only when all pieces … Continue reading No More QA
Discussions about monolith vs microservice are hotter than ever. Usually, a monolith is synonym for “big ball of mud” in these discussions. It of course needn’t be so. A modular monolith is perfectly possible. Also, microservices isn’t an entirely new idea either. As some says, it’s SOA done right. The usual argument in favor of … Continue reading Autonomy and Microservices
Architects do typically three things: they own, they coordinate, and they mentor. As an owner, the architect maintains the integrity of the system at a high level. He designs the foundations, identifies tradeoffs, decides on essential changes. As a coordinator, the architect facilitates work and optimizes the exchange of information. He connects people, gather information, … Continue reading Do You Need an Architect?
