blackadder's comments

blackadder | 3 months ago | on: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

This is my biggest frustration. Why not check with the compiler to generate code that would actually compile? I've had this with Go and .Net in the Jetbrains IDE. Had to turn ML auto-completion off. It was getting in the way.

blackadder | 3 months ago | on: Why Nietzsche matters in the age of artificial intelligence

Gertz speaks at tech conferences and that’s how I came across his work https://youtu.be/mcPFs5im2bs?si=DeEcWROAWBjR-RVu

blackadder | 4 years ago | on: Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker

Been reading about Systems Thinking lately. I think the command and control assumption comes from the influence of System Dynamics (Forrester, Meadows, Senge), which attempts to simulate the system. This seems to be a North American view of systems thinking due to the popularity of Systems Dynamics. But the European views have a focus on emergent behaviour and critically looking at hierarchies and power structures. Although Meadows emphasises 'dancing with systems' in contrast with controlling systems.

blackadder | 5 years ago | on: Stripe acquires Nigeria’s Paystack for $200M+

Or that Telco who had an API that couldn't handle more than one concurrent request per minute, and will fall over if I did more than that. Throw in FTP for extra complexity.. Integration challenges are hard. Makes sense for Stripe to buy someone who has solved it.

blackadder | 5 years ago | on: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

This was our experience as well. There was no way I would have left my wife alone for the first 4-6 weeks. Even though we didn't have any complication and a relatively "easy" birth. First month was just survival mode. I took 5 weeks off (4 weeks paid paternity leave and another of annual leave) . I'm glad I was around. It increased my confidence as a father too.

blackadder | 6 years ago | on: The ideal DevOps team structure

Recommend looking at https://web.devopstopologies.com/. Good to understand the interplay between different team structures.

blackadder | 7 years ago | on: Building a better gov.uk, step by step

It depends on the project. CF isn't the only platform. I've worked on non-CF projects under the GDS umbrella. There is a bit of Azure PaaS and AWS too.

blackadder | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Going to lead a struggling dev team in a different culture, now what?

There is a fine line to tread to make these changes whilst delivering. There was never a point were we stopped everything to make all these changes. The changes have to happen gradually, and they do take a long time, many months. It involves changing people, teaching them new habits and helping them do it. The habits have to be sustainable.

Limiting work in progress, forces the issue upstream. Managers are forced to realise how much of a precious resource the team is, and why they are struggling. Throwing more work at a struggling team makes it even worse.

blackadder | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Going to lead a struggling dev team in a different culture, now what?

I've been in similar situations in the past a few times and did a talk on how I did it.

Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYzk2BKeG9s

Blog Post :https://www.hibri.net/2016/06/18/continuous-delivery-rags-to...

There is no one way, every team has been different (for me), it what technique you use depends on context. They key themes that stand out for me are

1. Limiting Work in Progress (focus on delivering one thing at a time), creates slack time, to learn new practices and start writing tests.

2. Focus on learning, don't expect everything to fall in place pretty good ( it took us about 3 months to even to get to a good starting point)

3. Pair and help them out.

blackadder | 7 years ago | on: Why Kubernetes Is the New Application Server

Bingo, you've hit the nail :) This is what I love about K8S. In addition you've got the K8S reconciliation loop running constantly to make sure the system is in the state you described via the API.