Here’s something I found myself saying — it’s stuck with me and that’s prompted me to look into it:

“Technology isn’t a thing you do, it’s a metaphor for exploring a philosophy of being”

There’s a moment in every discipline, art, craft and practice when you find yourself reaching beyond what you see, through the looking glass, to touch the essence. What is cloud really about?

Leaving home

My last couple of work years have sent me on a pilgrimage, prised me from my slumbering comfort zone and put me on a hard trail of discovery — to walk the halls of…

Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself — The Matrix

I had the pleasure of being a part of Serverless Days Cardiff 2020. If I could sum up my takeaway from the day, that classic quote from The Matrix would be it. Serverless has come a long way in the last couple of years. …

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. ― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

I like this sentiment for hackathons. The stories of Dr Seuss have stuck with me, peeping out from time to time from the recesses of my lived and imagined experience offering gentle wisdom. Hackathons are about creativity.

Hackathons are great for stepping out of the practical constraints of day to day work.

It’s a time to see what’s possible from a fresh perspective and perhaps being able to try new directions when…

Containers are complex, but they needn’t be mysterious. Here’s my de-jargoned guide to what they are and why they matter.

I had the pleasure of speaking at SwanseaCon this year for the second time and wanted to spread some love and understanding about containers. I find it’s great to be able to take something technical and make it accessible to a wider audience. I believe it helps us work better together.

As the title suggests, this is about containers “in practice”. As it happens, I spend a lot of time with four actual shipping containers that belong to Beechbrae, a…

I have an idea about the trajectory of Kubernetes. Instinct tells me it will both win and, simultaneously, become irrelevant to software delivery organisations.

I’ve been listening to conversations about Kubernetes (k8s) and trying to identify the recurring themes that polarise debate on whether it’s a “good” or “bad” idea. Ther are sensible points of view on both sides of the debate. It seems, like most of our ambiguous collective debates, that these are parallel conversations. Moving beyond binary opposition to a “yes, and” integration is one of the greatest human skills. …

Ever since working with a great team at the BBC, I’ve been noticing the momentum behind Google Cloud. I’ve been looking to do a certification for a while, so decided to go with Google’s Professional Cloud Architect.

If you do some research on the certification, you’ll find words like “vast” describing the scope of the exam. They’re not wrong. From compute, storage and networking, through business requirements, capacity planning, SRE, regulatory compliance, containers, continuous deployment, even kubectl commands, this isn’t something you can study for straight out of the gate from coding bootcamp.

The range of topics and the layers…

I think a lot about technology design, whether that’s architecture, build and deployment pipelines or the structure and clarity of code. The value of technology is in what you do with it.

The UK Government has an open Service Standard setting out the perspective and principles on which services (often citizen-facing services) are expected to be designed and built. I’m a fan of principles. They encode layers of experience and wisdom, making them accessible for our future selves to learn from and experiment with.

For me there’s no distance between service design and technology design. They’re integral to each other…

Enterprise has become one of those over-used words that mean anything and nothing to everyone. What does it actually mean and what does that mean for our organisations?

Back in the noughties I worked for a mid-sized technology consultancy called Detica. It was made up of around 500 people when I joined, steadily grew to a thousand or more and was eventually swallowed into BAE Systems. I learned something that’s stuck with me on that journey:

Scale is not quantitative, it’s qualitative

It might seem contradictory at first glance, but I had a series of experiences that led me to…