matthewpskelton

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They tried to make me do a reorg, but I said no, no, no

Inspired by a comment from Anders Bruvik, I asked ChatGPT 4o to write some song lyrics about the dreaded “re-org” and include some Team Topologies ideas: Please write song lyrics that are similar to the lyrics of the song “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse but are instead focused on avoiding a “reorg”. Include some concepts from Team Topologies. The first line of the song should be “They tried to make me…

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Expert consultation sessions now available online

I am now available again for 1-hour online consultation sessions. Use ONLINE20 for a 20% discount. We can shape a consulting session to explore any topic relevant to your organization’s current context and future goals. Typical topics include: Team Topologies fast flow digital transformation business agility organizational effectiveness internal tech conferences Continuous Delivery,…

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How to write good technical blog posts

How to write good technical blog posts http://wp.me/p22rdq-9D

I have been writing technical blog posts since 2002, but decided in late 2011 to change my writing style after undertaking various web content and SEO projects for clients and seeing the effects of good (and bad) writing. After 14 months of  applying my new blogging ‘rules’, I am pleased with the results: over 11,000 page impressions between December 2011 and today (January 12th, 2013), which…

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How to run a good tech conference

How to run a good tech conference - learning from @PipelineConf

I founded and helped to run the first PIPELINE Conference in 2014 and I have been part of the team that has run 5 of these events to date. Here are my thoughts on how to run a good tech conference based on my experience with PIPELINE and with other events I have attended and spoken at.

tl;dr: fabulous team + great attendee experience.

PIPELINE Conference team – photo by Fabienne Jung 1 – Find a…

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Diversity in tech conferences and meetups - how and why

Diversity in tech conferences and meetups – how and why

I have been helping to promote greater diversity in tech conferences and tech meetups since 2012. Here is my thinking on how to promote diversity in tech events and why I think diversity is important.

Update: please first read this post from Trisha Gee: What Can Conferences Do To Attract More Women Speakers? Trisha makes many excellent points; in this post I try to offer some additional…

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Designing organisations for responsiveness

Designing organisations for responsiveness

Key points: Set up the organisation to ‘sense’ its environment Treat internal teams (almost) as external providers Promise Theory is a useful approach to organisational agility I have been doing quite a bit of work recently with various organisations to help them develop new capabilities for building and evolving software-rich services. Part of this work involves thinking about the…

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Continuous Deployment is a niche practice; Continuous Delivery is more fundamental.

Continuous Deployment is a niche practice; Continuous Delivery is more fundamental.

Summary: many people confuse continuous deployment (pushing changes to live systems many times per day) with Continuous Delivery (reliable software releases through build, test, and deployment automation). Here is why I think that Continuous Delivery is the more fundamental practice. (more…)

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Things I (Don't) Like About Continuous Delivery - LondonCD meetup June 2017

Things I (Don't) Like About Continuous Delivery - @londoncd meetup June 2017

This is part 4 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article. Our 4th Open Space discussion challenged people to identify the things that they don’t like about the Continuous Delivery book: things that don’t work in practice, things that are plain wrong, etc. – a slightly cheeky session!…

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Continuous Delivery for Legacy/Heritage Systems - LondonCD meetup June 2017

Continuous Delivery for Legacy/Heritage Systems - @londoncd meetup June 2017

This is part 3 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article. Applying the principles and practices of Continuous Delivery for new software is fairly straightforward (at least, until you deal with data and databases). However, existing “legacy” systems that were built without many automated…

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Difficulties and Solutions for Continuous Delivery with Databases - LondonCD meetup June 2017

Difficulties and Solutions for Continuous Delivery with Databases - @londoncd meetup

This is part 2 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article. Continuous Delivery for web applications is (in 2017) largely a solved problem but where data and databases are concerned, Continuous Delivery becomes more difficult (I have written quite a bit about Continuous Delivery and…

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Continuous Security in Continuous Delivery - LondonCD meetup June 2017

Continuous Security in Continuous Delivery - LondonCD meetup June 2017 #londoncd

This is part 1 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article. How do we continuously address security concerns with modern software development? That was one of the questions we discussed and tried to answer at LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. “The yearly PEN test is dead!”, said one…

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July 2017 meetup report

July 2017 meetup report

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The transformational power of Continuous Delivery

The transformational power of Continuous Delivery

I was recently asked to answer some questions about Continuous Delivery for someone’s undergraduate university research. The questions were interesting, so here are my answers :) What do you feel are the benefits of adopting Continuous Delivery? How do you feel adopting Continuous Delivery has affected your development cycle? Do you think Continuous Delivery is an important approach for a company…

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Slides from talk on Rancher + GoCD at Amsterdam CD meetup

Slides from talk on Rancher + GoCD at Amsterdam CD meetup

I gave a talk at Continuous Delivery Amsterdam meetup group on 08 Feb 2017: Using Rancher for highly available deployment services with GoCD and TeamCity Tools like GoCD and TeamCity are excellent components of advanced Continuous Delivery deployment systems. They help us focus on deployment pipelines and the flow of changes, rather than “builds” or “environments”. We can further enhance these…

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Slides from my talk at DevOpsCon Munich on How and why to design your teams for software

Slides from my talk at DevOpsCon Munich on How and why to design your teams for software

I gave a talk at DevOpsCon Munich on How and why to design your teams for modern software systems – here are the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SkeltonThatcher/how-and-why-to-design-your-teams-for-modern-software-systems-matthew-skelton-devopscon-munich-2016 In the talk, I covered various angles including: Conway’s Law Cognitive Load for teams Team Topologies Guidelines for team design I will…

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Slides from Team and Monoliths talk at Velocity Conf EU, Amsterdam, 7 Nov

Slides from Team and Monoliths talk at Velocity Conf EU, Amsterdam, 7 Nov

I gave a talk at Velocity Conference Europe 2016 called How to break apart a monolithic system safely without destroying your team based on work we have done at Skelton Thatcher Consulting over the past few years with various organisations. Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SkeltonThatcher/teams-and-monoliths-matthew-skelton-velocity-eu-2016 The slides are on Slideshare…

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Why and How to Test Logging - InfoQ article

Why and How to Test Logging – InfoQ article

  Modern log aggregation & search tools provide significant new capabilities for teams building, testing, and running software systems. By treating logging as a core system component, and using techniques such as unique event IDs, transaction tracing, and structured log output, we gain rich insights into application behaviour and health, especially cross-component visibility. In this article on…