Opinion

I’ve been watching a pattern repeat itself for years, and it’s starting to grate. Someone at a conference hears about a new tool — some Kubernetes operator, or service mesh, or GitOps platform that’s supposedly going to fix everything — and they come back convinced their team needs it yesterday. Not because there’s a problem that needs solving. Because the tool exists. This isn’t about being anti-technology. I love good tools. But somewhere along the line, DevOps culture got it backwards. We’re picking solutions first and frantically searching for problems they might address, instead of looking at what’s actually broken and finding the simplest thing that fixes it. ...

Ultimately DevOps is an organisational transformation.

There was a period, roughly 2004 to 2008, when phone manufacturers decided that phones could be fashion accessories. Not phones that looked like fashion accessories. Actual fashion accessories that happened to make phone calls. I collected a few of them, or at least got close enough to handle them, and I still think some of the best phones I’ve ever held had nothing to do with specs or benchmarks. Nokia 8800 Sirocco This was the one that started it for me. Stainless steel body, a sliding mechanism that felt like opening a luxury watch case, and a weight to it that told you it was built from something real. The Nokia 8800 Sirocco wasn’t trying to be a smartphone. It was trying to be a thing you pulled out of your pocket and knew, immediately, was expensive. It worked. ...

You learn more from your mistakes than anything else, and I have made my fair share. The trick is to actually learn from them rather than just suffer through the consequences and call it experience. I have watched developers push code to production on a Friday afternoon because the business was breathing down their necks. The deadline was immovable, the pressure was real, and the production environment was treated as an afterthought. I have seen it happen more times than I care to count, and each time the same thing goes wrong: someone breaks something, and nobody wants to own it. ...

The freemium model has become all the rage in software circles. Offer a basic version of your product for free, then charge for the good stuff – premium features, extra storage, advanced functionality. It sounds like a clever way to build a user base, and for a handful of companies it has worked. But as someone who has watched this approach play out across the industry, I have my doubts about whether it is the right strategy for most startups. ...

Some people believe the best way to estimate a project is to produce detailed requirements and design documents for every feature before writing a line of code. It sounds professional. It sounds thorough. In practice, it usually turns out to be wrong. Requirements change. Priorities shift. The detailed estimate you spent weeks producing becomes irrelevant halfway through the project. That effort becomes wasted inventory – time and resources that could have been spent building something useful instead. ...

Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad yesterday. A tablet. Bigger than a phone, smaller than a laptop. No keyboard, no trackpad, no USB ports worth mentioning. The internet is already divided. Some call it a giant iPhone. Others call it a toy. A few are excited. I don’t have one yet, but the idea of a device that’s comfortable to hold for reading, browsing, and watching videos while on the couch appeals to me. It fills a gap that neither phones nor laptops really cover. ...

Every programmer knows the urge: scrap everything and rewrite it from scratch. It’s not that the existing code is bad. It’s that it’s hard to understand. Reading code is harder than writing it – you wrote the new code in your head, but the old code belongs to someone else (or to past you, who might as well be someone else). This is why every developer on your team has their own favourite way of splitting strings into arrays. Writing a new function is simpler and more enjoyable than learning how the existing one works. ...

Everyone tells you to go to college. It’s the default path. Finish school, get a degree, find a job. But is it actually worth it? The tuition costs are rising, graduates are struggling to find work in their field, and student debt is becoming a genuine burden. For some people, college is absolutely the right choice. The networking, the structured learning, the credential – it all adds up. For others, it’s four years and a mountain of debt for a piece of paper that doesn’t open any doors. ...