Great paper, but I don’t entirely agree with everything… — Introduction The industry is catching up to the wisdom that developer experience (DevEx) is paramount to increase productivity for companies that produce software. So then the paper “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity?” …

But not in the way you think… — AI is very far away from being sentient or human-like Sentient AI is not coming soon, not this decade, not next, and I am willing to wager your grandchildren won’t see it either. …

The art of asking the right questions — Prompt engineering is the art of asking very effective questions to an AI to get the best possible response. They are popping up worldwide, some paying over $300K already. What does this mean? AI is automation on steroids. The way that most people will use ChatGPT is as a dynamic template generator. To create…

Engineers often hate recruiters, but they shouldn’t. — Why recruiters are bad I don’t dislike recruiters, and I may be in the minority because most engineers I talk to do. I completely understand why. Many recruiters will… Be charming as long as they can “sell you” and instantly ghost you when you are useless to them. Send you offers for jobs that…

Design an Internal Developer Platform that your users love using — Why Focus on User Experience? When reading about platform engineering you may see the term DevEx (Developer Experience) thrown about, and see new roles that focus on this area too. This is all very nice, but if we deliver platforms that are poorly designed, the developer experience will always suck. In a previous article I…

When “Read the F$!%ing Manual” Veils Bad Design… — I’ve seen it time and again in my field of work when someone asks a question that’s considered trivial, devs say it, sysadmins say it, DevOps say it: “Just RTFM man!” RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual) epitomizes the nerd who hates people. It stinks because it is condescending. …

Yes, we really don’t know what we are doing (mostly) — Learn Everything Now! Around a year ago I read a hilarious post in the DevOps subreddit: The funniest part of the post is how true it is, nearly 500 upvotes and multiple responses confirmed it— we really don’t know what we are doing! The impostor syndrome is not just a feeling in DevOps…

In the first part of this article I gave an introduction to platform engineering and explained what an internal developer platform is. In this article I will explain how you can create your own using a variety of open source and commercial tools. Open Source tools There is no single open source tool…

A ticket out of GCP’s BeyondCorp Confusion Purgatory — Introduction I wrote this post because I find the BeyondCorp documentation by Google quite confusing, and occasionally a little misleading. Here is one good example from a presentation given by Google: First of all, the graph is misleading because ACM does not really enforce any requests, that’s just where you define…