I’m always looking for more time and space to get things done. For every useful unit of actual hands-on-keys work time I spend writing thought leadership pieces, or time on briefing and advisory calls with innovative vendors, there must be a corresponding amount of time away from the computer to realign my thinking and grasp … continue reading
In the digital age, software engineering leaders are pivotal in driving business priorities forward. Yet, the role is fraught with challenges, as leaders juggle numerous responsibilities, often finding themselves mired in tactical tasks at the expense of strategic initiatives. A recent Gartner survey sheds light on this issue, revealing that only 7% excel across all … continue reading
Change is necessary for growth in software engineering organizations, but adapting to change requires time, energy and resources that can detract from a focus on delivering value. While a certain degree of change is essential, excessive change can lead to change fatigue among developers. Change fatigue is a negative response to change and can include … continue reading
The iPhone 16 Pro is Apple’s premier iPhone. It has several new features, like a dedicated camera multi-function button that cuts across the iPhone line, that are both useful and needed. But as I watched the launch presentation of the iPhone 16 Pro and they spoke about the camera features, the phone seemed to be … continue reading
When multiple buyers and sellers trade goods and services in a marketplace, participants benefit from efficiencies of scale, as their specializations of supply come together to meet customer demand. In enterprise software marketplaces, each participant vendor contributes specialized expertise, functionality, and scale that are essential to building a complete solution for end users—assuming of course, … continue reading
Technical debt is a normal and unavoidable side effect of any IT implementation. It occurs as teams “borrow” against quality by making sacrifices, taking shortcuts or using workarounds to meet delivery deadlines. Eventually, this can impact performance, scalability, resilience, complexity, agility or similar characteristics. The impact of technical debt in integration can be much higher … continue reading
Synthetic data is a class of data artificially generated through advanced methods like machine learning that can be used when real-world data is unavailable. It offers a multitude of compelling advantages, such as its flexibility and control, which allows engineers to model a wide range of scenarios that might not be possible with production data. … continue reading
The problem is not new: Modern software architectures are complex distributed systems made up of many independent services, many of which are built by other teams or cloud providers. Kubernetes wrangles this herd of services—but adds yet more complexity that must be tamed. This creates hard problems at the intersection of development and operations. Developers … continue reading
AI (as in Artificial Intelligence, not ‘augmented’ or ‘automated’ intelligence) has rapidly become a transformational factor for dozens of markets, including software development itself. Even if we were aware that generative AIs like ChatGPT can ultimately generate bullshit, as my colleague Jason Bloomberg says, and we know they are getting overhyped across social networks and … continue reading
Innovation is essential for software engineering leaders to circumvent competition and create an attractive technology landscape for users and developers. Innovation keeps processes, tools and outcomes fresh and productive. However, software engineering teams often experience burnout due to the demand for innovation and have little energy to innovate their own processes and practices. Software engineering … continue reading
Cloud native technologies—with their malleable, modular microservice architectures—quickly generate transformative digital innovations that deliver high-demand customer capabilities and operational value breakthroughs. But wait, how many Kubernetes experts do we have? We’ve got an industry-wide shortage of skilled software development and operations talent—and the complexity of cloud native development is exacerbating the problem. We’re not going … continue reading
Even as late as December of last year, few were aware of generative AI. Then ChatGPT popped up, and Microsoft started putting it in everything including its developer tools. Now it’s currently the hottest thing in the market. It is also still immature, but it is working well enough that people are finding it surprisingly … continue reading
A lot of us have been looking at ARM more closely since litigation with Qualcomm started. To refresh you on that situation, that litigation appears to be an effort to get Qualcomm to pay significantly more for licenses for PCs than it does for smartphones, even though the PC effort has yet to be successful. … continue reading
Software engineering leaders need to foster collaboration with site reliability engineers (SRE) in order to scale unplanned work and improve customer experience. Software engineering teams tend to focus on releasing new product features quickly, which causes them to not always prioritize the reliability of new features. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of enterprises will … continue reading
