Email Archive

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September 2, 2022
[Oldletter #27] The Business of SaaS, broken software hiring and defending Not-Invented-Here syndrome
August 26, 2022
[Oldletter #26] 10X organizations, the non-obvious importance of speed and Product vs Feature teams
August 25, 2022
In what contexts are your favourite tools and practices NOT a good fit?
August 19, 2022
[Oldletter #25] Turning the database inside out, Inside the AWS datacenters, and Opinionated thoughts on SQL databases
August 12, 2022
[Oldletter #24] The mythical man month, being a senior engineer and one size fits all databases
August 5, 2022
[Oldletter #23] A taxonomy of technical debt, how complex systems fail, and full service ownership
July 29, 2022
[Oldletter #22] Testing in production, Jobs To Be Done and The Duct Tape Programmer
July 22, 2022
[Oldletter #19] One's own project, Making users awesome and Obvious to you yet amazing to others
July 15, 2022
[Oldletter #18] Crossing the Chasm, Team Topologies and Solitary or sociable unit tests
June 24, 2022
[Oldletter #17] Why the middle tier won't matter, Commoditise your product's complements, and the Developer docs sniff test
June 17, 2022
[Oldletter #16] Thinking through writing, building a developer community and software business strategies
June 14, 2022
A minimum bar for professional software engineering practices
June 10, 2022
[Oldletter #15] Competing with AWS, The Blockchain Problem Space, and the Bezos decision framework
June 7, 2022
Infrastructure-from-Code vs Infrastructure-as-Code
June 3, 2022
[Oldletter #14] Undifferentiated heavy lifting, Vertical vs horizonal thinking, and The Tiny MBA
June 2, 2022
Common bus factor pitfalls in serverless projects
June 1, 2022
Round-up of my serverless articles from May
May 31, 2022
Serverless in startups, small teams FTW and the future of app development (podcast)
May 30, 2022
Setting up developer AWS accounts for a new startup
May 27, 2022
[Oldletter #13] Complexity has to live somewhere, Developer marketing doesn't exist and First principles
May 26, 2022
IaC is becoming table stakes for new cloud services
May 25, 2022
Marketing to developers
May 24, 2022
Learning adjacent technologies
May 23, 2022
Practise Continuous Integration to mitigate CloudFormation stack deployment pains
May 20, 2022
[Oldletter #12] The Python Paradox, Platforms Rant and the Software Testing Honeycomb
May 19, 2022
How serverless can improve a startup's feature velocity
May 18, 2022
Trying out Serverless Stack/SST
May 17, 2022
Learning curve complexity vs operational complexity
May 16, 2022
Event-driven architecture is not a must-have to get started building with serverless
May 13, 2022
[Oldletter #11] Software complexity, How to teach code and You Probably Are Gonna Need It
May 12, 2022
Where to find serverless developers online
May 11, 2022
Why are so few funded startups using serverless?
May 10, 2022
Researching the benefits of serverless and objections to it by different organisation types
May 9, 2022
Moving from one to two developers on your AWS serverless project
May 6, 2022
[Oldletter #10] Small batches, the no-code delusion and why SOLID is wrong
May 5, 2022
Quantifying the cost of introducing extra moving parts into your serverless architecture
May 4, 2022
Use Continuous Deployment as an accelerator to learning serverless
May 3, 2022
How to prevent concurrent deployments of serverless stacks in GitHub Actions
April 29, 2022
[Oldletter #9] Trunk-based development, programming falsehoods and managing cognitive load in software teams
April 28, 2022
Spotter vs safety rails
April 27, 2022
Modern Software Engineering notes
April 26, 2022
How to navigate serverless best practices (The Serverless Mindset podcast)
April 25, 2022
The problem with TCO
April 22, 2022
[Oldletter #8] Understanding, debugging and testing distributed systems
April 21, 2022
Research-backed conclusions in software delivery
April 20, 2022
Local development is an XY problem
April 19, 2022
A minimal set of documentation for your serverless project
April 15, 2022
[Oldletter #7] Products are made of people, a tech documentation framework and the cloud books you need on your shelf
April 14, 2022
DevOps practices for small serverless teams
April 13, 2022
It depends on your organisational context
April 12, 2022
My development workflow for implementing a feature in an AppSync project
April 11, 2022
Focus your code reviews on identifying hard-to-change-later items
April 6, 2022
GraphQL codegen for AppSync projects
April 5, 2022
Important but not urgent
April 4, 2022
Handling future changes to your DynamoDB access patterns
April 1, 2022
[Software Engineering Oldletter #6] Systems thinking, expert beginners and evergreen notes
March 31, 2022
The different dimensions of scaling
March 30, 2022
Pushing for a better developer experience for DynamoDB
March 29, 2022
What are the gaps in the AWS serverless offerings?
March 28, 2022
How do you filter what you consume from the tech news firehose?
March 25, 2022
[Software Engineering Oldletter #5] Abstractions, leaky and wrong
March 24, 2022
Sharing a cloud resource between multiple developers
March 23, 2022
How can we build software applications that are resilient to changes in the engineering team?
March 22, 2022
Deciding on what environments to create for a serverless team
March 21, 2022
The cost of a feature
March 18, 2022
[Software Engineering Oldletter #4] Product-minded engineers, Don't call yourself a programmer, and 5 rules for doing Great Work
March 16, 2022
Use SSO instead of IAM users to connect to your AWS accounts
March 15, 2022
How to re-use some of your E2E tests as smoke tests
March 14, 2022
Why monolithic deployments make sense for small serverless teams
March 11, 2022
[Software Engineering Oldletter #3] Majestic monoliths, microservice size and alerting
March 10, 2022
Use the Errors section of the docs to make your AWS integrations more robust
March 9, 2022
Prematurely optimising for cloud bill in serverless apps
March 8, 2022
How to continually integrate WIP features for your serverless app
March 7, 2022
When prototype becomes production
March 4, 2022
[Software Engineering Oldletter #2] Dark Matter Developers, Empathy and Plain Text Files
March 2, 2022
How to do an atomic DynamoDB transaction with more than 25 items
March 1, 2022
New serverless TypeScript tools I’m excited about
February 28, 2022
Deployability is a top priority for your cloud services
February 25, 2022
[Software Engineering Oldletter #1] Boring tech, Golden Sprawl and measuring the cost of no CD
February 24, 2022
Serverless fosters small autonomous teams
February 23, 2022
The magical power of questions
February 22, 2022
Speed and quality in software delivery are not a trade-off
February 21, 2022
Low friction Diagrams-as-Code
February 18, 2022
Reacquainting yourself with the evergreen fundamentals of software engineering
February 16, 2022
The delayed pain of dependency churn
February 15, 2022
Are software applications getting harder to maintain?
February 14, 2022
Managed services are so much more than canned functionality
February 11, 2022
Serverless ≠ Microservices
February 10, 2022
What stops us from writing tests?
February 9, 2022
Start with Continuous Deployment
February 8, 2022
The naive Lambda-as-transaction-coordinator pattern
January 20, 2022
Your serverless-first line in the sand
November 4, 2021
The Serverless Architecture Astronaut
June 30, 2021
Things I believe about software
June 23, 2021
Production-fidelity developer testing
June 16, 2021
Talking testing with Yan Cui [podcast]
June 7, 2021
How to wait for an async task to complete inside an E2E test
June 3, 2021
Testing Serverless Backends survey results + the local vs cloud debate
May 28, 2021
Testing serverless backends — your experiences
May 26, 2021
Preventing unwanted changes and data loss in a CloudFormation stack
May 24, 2021
Spec your tests before writing them
April 27, 2021
Serverless app platforms and feature ceilings
June 19, 2020
Serverless Adoption Survey — The numbers so far
April 6, 2020
Thou shalt not build
March 18, 2020
An offer of help
January 14, 2020
Is your serverless app too DRY?