Alex Hudson

The news about plans for Symfony 4 has got a number of my dev team a bit excited about the possibilities – although, so far, there is precious little information about the new tool, Flex, and exactly what “composition over inheritance” will mean in practice.

One similar solution that this reminds me strongly of is Django, and its approach to “apps” – although this isn’t necessarily highlighted, a composition-type system ships with Django and comes with a number of both positive and negative implications.

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There’s a great blog post doing the rounds today, titled “Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse“. Going through a number of examples of metric-based assessment, the conclusion is that standard management practice applied to academic work results in obviously worse outcomes.

At the heart of the argument is an interesting contradiction – that it is possible to assess academic work and show that under a specific regime the results are less good, while simultaneously it is impossible to assess the results of academic work in such a way as to improve it. However, it’s possible to accept a slightly weaker form of the argument – that the practice of measuring while science is being done negatively affects the work in a way that appraising the results post-facto doesn’t. I’m not in a position to really know whether or not this is genuinely the case for academic work, but I’m seeing people apply the same argument to software development, and I truly believe it doesn’t apply.

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There are a lot of people with strong thoughts about brand and culture, and how the two relate to each other. From conversations I’ve had with others, I thought it high time to put my perspective down in writing.

I have a lot of time for this HBR article, “Brand is Culture, Culture is Brand“. It is absolutely correct to say that you cannot build a brand if your business culture does not / will not support and live that brand, and this is a fault seen so commonly. Business rebrand frequently; and it’s very common to see immediate push-back because the way the business operates doesn’t fly with the new brand at all.

However, I think things have to go deeper than this.

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So, after my previous slightly ranty post, I’ve been trying out a few different tools and approaches to building containers, attempting to find something which is closer to my idea of what good looks like. One tool stands out from the rest: Habitus.

Habitus provides just-enough-Make to bring some sanity to the Docker build process, with the following killer features:

1. ability to order container builds by expressing a dependency from one to another
2. first-class support for artefacts created during the container build process, which can be extracted and used as input for later builds
3. management API to provide build-time secrets into the containers

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I spent a few hours this weekend attempting to re-acquaint myself with the Docker system and best practices by diving in and updating a few applications I run. I wrote up an article no long after Docker’s release, saying that it looked pretty poor, and unfortunately things haven’t really changed – this doesn’t stop me using it, but it’s a shame that the ecosystem apparently has learnt nothing from those that came before.

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This is a quick and pithy review of Emily Webber’s free e-book, “The Agile Team Onion“. At about 20 pages of content, it’s a concise enough work itself – I personally appreciate the laser-like focus on a single subject; in this case, it’s thinking about the various factors that affect agile team make-up, sizing and interfacing with other people and teams.

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Project management is always guaranteed to bring out some strong opinions, and a recent Twitter discussion was no different – but, while the core discussion on Twitter was great, it really deserves a much longer-form treatment. Paul Johnston wrote up his thoughts about getting people to talk about predictions instead of deadlines – and much of it is hard to argue with, but I have a bit of a different perspective.

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This is not a post about Brexit; this is about conversations. Storytelling rose in the 80’s as a key marketing tool – phenomena like the Nescafe “Gold Blend” adverts demonstrated how the ability to tell a story could convincingly engage consumers en masse. Truth be told, this was nothing new – the “soap opera” is so-called because those ongoing serial dramas used to be sponsored by soap manufacturers. But, the key insight by the storytellers was that creating a story around a message you wanted to communicate (rather than simply being associated to or referenced by the story) was very powerful.

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Having droned on a little the other day about duplication in Stackanetes (in hindsight, I had intended to make a “it’s turtles all the way down” type jibe), I’ve been delighted to read lots of other people spouting the same opinion – nothing quite so gratifying as confirmation bias.

Massimo has it absolutely right when he describes container scheduling as an incestuous orgy (actually, he didn’t, I just did, but I think that was roughly his point). What is most specifically obvious is the fact that while there is a lot of duplication, there isn’t much agreement about the hierarchy of abstraction: a number of projects have started laying claim to be the lowest level above containers.

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