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Following the recently published article on Cloud Native Sustainability: Strategies for carbon reduction the Agile meets Architecture conference team has now published the recording of my talk on the topic. In it I go over the most important concepts of green computing, I explain how organisations are estimating the carbon emissions related to their cloud usage, and I offer some insights into GreenOps and strategies to reduce carbon emssions from IT.
Over the past year I’ve spent a fair amount of time getting my head around green software and what role cloud computing plays in that space. There’s a talk that I’m currently presenting at various conferences and events. If you just want the essentials there’s now an article that I wrote with my colleague Seema: Cloud Native Sustainability: Strategies for carbon reduction.
In the article, we explore how an organisation can reduce their carbon footprint by moving to the cloud and to cloud-native architectures. And that’s an important point right there: Shifting workloads from on-premises data centres to the cloud can significantly reduce carbon emissions, but to realise the full potential of carbon reductions that a cloud-based solution can offer you will have to move to a cloud-native architecture.
The podcast team at the Handelsblatt newspaper invited me to an episode of their So klingt Wirtschaft podcast. Jana Samsonova and I talk about green computing, responsible use of technology, and how moving to a public cloud can reduce CO2 emissions. As you may have guessed at this stage, the podcast is in German.
Developer experience platforms have been a hot topic for a while now, and I've talked about them with many of our clients. Last year, I distilled the essence from those client presentations into a talk that I gave a GeeCON Prague, and now the team have made the recording of the talk available on YouTube. DX platforms are not as hyped at Gen AI but if you want to make your developer teams more effective, they are certainly something to look into.
In this article, published in the funkschau magazine, I discuss an important issue that our modern software supply chains bring when it comes to security: the role of the sprawling web of dependencies.
You can read the article in the online edition of the magazine on page 42. Sorry, no direct link, and the text is in German.
A few years ago I wrote a blog post about my first impressions of Rust. This has grown into a full talk introducing Rust to experienced developers, which I have given a number of times. This is (so far) my favourite version, from GOTO Copenhagen 2021. By the way, this was my first in-person conference following the Covid outbreak.
If you've read the post or watched the video you know that the code examples are taken from one of my hobby projects, an artificial life / genetic programming simulation. Because people have asked I've now made the code available in this Github repo. Please beware, though, there is no thorough documentation on what the simulator actually does and how to make sense of the output. Since I wrote the talk the codebase has evolved a little bit, too. If you want the exact version that the talk's based on, please choose the initial version of the code in the repository.
It was fantastic to be at an in-person conference again, at GOTO Copenhagen last November. After delivering my Rust talk, Lars Jensen moderated a coversation between me and Richard Feldman of Elm fame. Based on the party keynote, in which Mark Rendle had presented his idea of the worst programming language ever, Richard and I chatted about the ideal programming langauge. The video has now been released.
For a long time Eberhard Wolff has been hosting the Software Architektur series. In episode 104 Eberhard and I talk about DevSecOps, one of my favourite topics at the moment. Please note the conversation is in German.
As you might remember I have spent quite some time exploring how to apply data visualisations to codebases. My interest waned a bit with the rise of microservices, because the codebases got much smaller and the programming languages more varied (which was bad from a tooling perspective). However, when our podcast hosts Rebecca and Ashok asked me whether I was interested in joining a podcast on this topic, together with Korny, who has done some great work in this field recently, I obviously couldn't resist. Here's the result.
In one of the discussions of the Doppler group, where we create the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar, I mentioned that I saw a shift of code from the server to the browser. Mike, who is one of the hosts of our podcast series, got interested, and so did Rebecca, our CTO at ThoughtWorks. Together we recorded a conversation that retraces the twenty year history from “rich” desktop applications to systems where more than 50% of the code runs in the web browser, ending with a brief look into the future.
Since 2009 a Hackintosh has been my main computer at home. In case you are unfamilar with the concept, a Hackintosh is a generic PC built from components that runs Apple's macOS. In hindsight this was a good choice at the time but a number of factors have now driven me to buy MacBook Pro for personal use.
With the announcements by Apple at WWDC this year a beautiful symmetry seems ahead. In 2006 I bought one of the first Intel MacBook Pros and now I bought what will likely be one of the last Intel MacBook Pros. And in case you're keeping track, my PowerBook (Pismo) is still functioning, but not used anymore.
I have updated my personal Hackintosh journal with a final chapter.
A while ago I wrote a blog post about my first impressions of Rust. This has grown into a full talk introducing Rust to experienced developers, and the recording of that talk at YOW! Melbourne has just been released.
If you've read the post or watched the video you know that the code examples are taken from one of my hobby projects, an artificial life / genetic programming simulation. Because people have asked I've now made the code available in this Github repo. Please beware, though, there is no thorough documentation on what the simulator actually does and how to make sense of the output.
At the last meeting of the Doppler group, where we create the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar, my colleagues Evan, Neal, Zhamak and myself had a discussion about "serendipitous events". This is the idea of publishing events without knowing whether anyone will consume them, in the hope to create moments of serendipity, where someone discovers information in the enterprise that they can use to create new value. It's an intriguing idea that is too complex to fit the short description we can put on the radar.
The IEEE Software magazine’s September/October issue is about Software Engineering’s 50th Anniversary. I contributed an article that is loosely based on my DevOps talk. It is available without subscription here (PDF).
In my latest talk, All Roads Lead to DevOps, I discuss how DevOps fits with modern software architecture concepts like Microservices and Cloud computing.
At a recent Technical Advisory Board meeting Sam Newman and I had a conversation about microservices and cloud computing; how they have really brought something new and helpful, but also how, as usual, they are seen as the silver bullet that will solve all our problems.
Our colleague Johannes Thönes interviewed Folker Bernitt and myself about the Pixelated project that Folker and I am involved with at ThoughtWorks. This interview has now been published on Soundcloud.
At GOTO Aarhus 2014 Ola Bini hosted a discussion with Martin Fowler, Tim Bray, and myself covering topics such as browser security, identity providers, password managers, monopolisation of internet services, and the future of mass surveillance.
In September Michael Tiberg invited me to give my Architecture without Architects talk at the excellent FooCafe. The talk was recorded and the video is available on Youtube.
One of the aspects of our industry that I find most exciting is the amount of change and progress. Sometimes that progress means that even ideas that have come to be considered accepted wisdom need to be revisited. In some of my talks I've been arguing for a while now that we need to reconsider the general preference for buying software (over building it).
At the same time Rien Dijkstra was in the process of editing a collection of essays on the topic of sourcing IT and he kindly invited me to contribute my ideas. I was more than happy to accept his offer and I am proud to be part of this collaboration. A preview of my essay has been published on this site as an article series. Now the book is published and widely available.
Three years ago, unhappy with Apple's hardware lineup, I decided to dip my toes into the Hackintosh world. It was a resounding success and the machine I built back then has served me well. So, last month, with Intel's Ivy Bridge and Apple's Mountain Lion out, I decided to build another Hackintosh. I have written up my experience in this article.
Admittedly, I've been struggling with the "Architect" title in the IT world. It is not that I think there's no role for architecture, far from it, but too often I've encountered architects who focus too narrowly on architecture, losing track of the realities of actual software development and the context in which the software will be used. I wonder, if there was no "Architect" title and people who are responsible for architecture would be called guide or coach or tech lead, or just the senior developer, whether things would be better.
About a year ago, in a discussion about architects, rather than trying to define what an architect is or does, we looked at what he or she should know. We expressed our ideas as mini-essays, strictly limiting ourselves to one per essay, and it turned out that, at least to my surprise, there was a lot of agreement; maybe because we hadn't come up with hard and fast rules but with ideas and guidelines.
Luckily Richard Monson-Haefel was part of that discussion and he had the resolve and means to make our thoughts more widely available. Our list of the 97 things every architect should know was collected and refined on this wiki, and is available under a creative commons license. For a more convenient read it has now also been published as a book by O'Reilly. As expected, the discussions have begun.
Of the many projects I have worked on the rewrite of the Guardian website is certainly a highlight. And in this case I can even speak about it in detail. In fact, Mat Wall from the Guardian and I presented some of our experiences at several conferences, and now the Software Engineering Radio has published a podcast in which we talk about this project.
It has been in the making for some time but now the ThoughtWorks Anthology is available from the Pragmatic Programmers. The Anthology is a collection of essays written by individual authors from ThoughtWorks covering a wide range of topics that we encounter on our projects. My essay finally gets our thinking on Domain Annotations into writing, after we had presented the ideas at a couple of conferences. A more in-depth description of the Anthology can be found on the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
I have looked at applications of visualisations techniques to improve software quality for good while now, and at a QCon conference earlier this year Floyd Marinescu and I chatted about my current thinking. If you are interested, the full interview has been published on InfoQ now. More here.
I'm completely convinced that development processes following the ideas outlined in the Agile Manifesto have helped us tremendously when delivering software for our clients at ThoughtWorks. (You noticed that I didn't just say "Agile processes"; this term has become overloaded to the point of being almost meaningless. It's good to go back to first principles.) At the same time I'm involved with a few Open Source projects.
So, what's in the intersection of these two topics? The answer is in an article that has been published in this month's issue of Linux User.
I know this is not available freely and I will make this article available online soon.
Ian Cartwright and I had many many discusions about SOA, what it means for us, for the industry, whether it's something revolutionary or just a rebranding excercise.
We finally managed to get our thoughts together and wrote and article that just appeared in the Business IT Interface section of the British Computing Society's site.
Admittedly, I've been struggling with the "Architect" title in the IT world. It is not that I think there's no role for architecture, far from it, but too often I've encountered architects who focus too narrowly on architecture, losing track of the realities of actual software development and the context in which the software will be used. I wonder, if there was no "Architect" title and people who are responsible for architecture would be called guide or coach or tech lead, or just the senior developer, whether things would be better.