I’ve recently crossed over 2 years in a software consultancy. Previously I spent around 10 years working in product companies. As you can imagine there are some differences between them and I wanted to write down some of the things I’ve noticed. Note: These are 100% my thoughts, and don’t…

DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics are an excellent way for engineering organisations to measure and improve their performance. Up until now, monitoring the DORA metrics across Github, Jira, Azure Devops etc required custom tooling or a tedious manual process. With Apache Dev Lake you can get beautiful reporting for…

GitHub is a great place to store code. But it’s also a great place to store any data that you need backed up, versioned, accessible from anywhere and easy to use. In this post I’ll show you some surprising uses for GitHub as a datastore like… as a comments system…

I needed to run git natively in windows (no wsl) for a recent project. I use ssh certificates to authenticate with my git provider and it was difficult to get it all working as expected. I didn’t want to use Git for Windows because it uses GitBash. I couldn’t use…

With most web applications you can drastically increase performance by using caching for data that’s frequently read across network boundaries. This lesson will explore some common caching techniques, you’ll learn how some common tools and libraries provide caching for us. While caching helps with performance it can also cause some…

I left my home country right after university and I worked and lived in a few countries since then. I’ve met lots of amazing people but I’ve always struggled to remember contact details and important dates for everyone. As we get busier with life, time rushes on faster and faster…

Note: This was written in August 2022 and I assume things will change quickly. It will be interesting to look back in a couple of years to see how much of this article is still relevant! The danger of implicit or optional Hybrid Most tech organisations were forced to change to remote during lockdown but haven’t explicitly…

Introduction Google Analytics (GA) has been a force in web site metrics since 2005. The metrics have always been incredibly useful but it’s a “free” product so you pay for it by providing all your site data to Google for tracking and advertising. With Google Analytics your metrics are tightly coupled…

Introduction Open Telemetry is good enough to use in production projects and most cloud providers and telemetry services have integrated open telemetry into their products. In this article I’ll briefly describe what Open Telemetry is, how it can help you build better products and systems and why you should consider using…