Recent content in Build Better Products, Faster on Alex Hudson
Most teams already let production shape what they do next, but we still think in these relatively linear cycles from idea to production. An incident changes a feature requirement. A cost spike forces a redesign. A support pattern triggers a new feature flag or rate limit. These issues get ticketed, included into the backlog, and the development team attempts to address this growing list in…
Everyone wants to go faster; this has always been true, and it is especially true in the context of LLM deployment. Teams using AI in development are not just using it to write code more quickly, but, being frank, AI has not yet demonstrated that it is good at many of the other tasks. Teams therefore have to decide where human attention buys the most safety and quality for the least overhead and…
I’ve been cooking with Mindful Chef for about two years. For those who don’t know, it’s sort of yet another meal kit service — you can probably think of similar names — but with a focus on nutrition and balanced meals. 
 If you’ve been thinking about trying it out, I can heartily recommend it, but it’s not going to suit everyone. Read my (too extensive?) thoughts…
I left Twitter not long after it rebranded to X. At the time, I didn’t write about why — I simply walked away. But recent developments have prompted me to finally put my thoughts down.
Security by Design 
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Everyone is talking about what AI can do right now, and the impact that it is likely to
have on us. This weekends’s Semafor Flagship (which is an excellent newsletter; I recommend subscribing!) asks a great question: “What do we teach the AI generation?”. As someone who grew up with computers, knowing he wanted to write software, and knowing that tech was a growth area, I…
You’ve likely heard the term “metaverse” many times over the past few years, and outside the
realm of science fiction novels, it has tended to refer to some kind of computer-generated
world. There’s often little distinction between a “metaverse” and a relatively interactive
virtual reality world. 
 There are a huge number of people who think this…
Azure has never been the #1 cloud provider - that spot continues to belong
to AWS, which is the category leader. However, in most people’s minds, it has
been a pretty reasonable #2, and while not necessarily vastly differentiated
from AWS there are enough things to write home about. 
 However, even as a user and somewhat of a fan of the Azure technology, it is
proving…
The UK NHSX “contact tracing” app is being deployed today, in one small
place, to test whether or not this approach might help get us out of
lockdown. Unfortunately, the launch is beset with published argument
one way and the other about whether or not this app is technically
good, meets privacy expectations, or simply whether it will work.
It’s all over the news, and this is Yet Another Hot Take. Don’t completely despair: I’m not going to tell you what the virus is, or cover why you should (or shouldn’t) be worried. What I am going to tell you is that your business should be prepared. Even if you have a decent business continuity plan in place, there are reasons to review it now.
I rarely blog about purely technical errors, but this specific message from yarn is
something I’ve seen a number of people struggling with. I’m going to explain a bit
more about why it comes about, and how I solved it in my situation. This will not
work for everyone , but it may give you a hint.
Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of
“no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications
without having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this,
and I think some of the “no code” tools are great. But I also thing it’s wrong at heart.
A good friend recently wrote to me to ask what it takes to become a CTO in this day and age.
Unfortunately, he DM’d me over Twitter: try as I might, there was nothing of note I could
squeeze into that format (usual adage of “if I’d had the time, it would have been briefer”).
So, I wrote this largely for him, but I think it’s generally useful.
I regularly get asked by businesses - often start-ups - how to approach information
security. This has become an increasingly frequent question for those looking for
some kind of formal recognition, usually certification. Everyone knows that these
will take time and cost money. At the end of the day, is it worth it?
Jack Dorsey, famous for co-founding Twitter, is in the news currently as his Twitter account was hijacked. Most stories have been pains to point out that Twitter wasn’t directly attacked: instead, they went for his mobile phone. This raises the question: if you use your phone for authentication, how secure is it?
About Me 
 I’m a CTO with twenty years of management experience in e-commerce and software-as-a-service product development, spanning start-up to enterprise. I lead organisations through significant periods of technical change. 
 For most businesses I work with, “digital transformation” is complete (if they were ever non-digital) and I’m leading them into the…
The Libra Association de-cloaked today. With Facebook amongst the initial backers, this is being seen – fairly or not – as the Facebook cryptocurrency. The reputation of the system, and potentially the take-up, may end up being harmed by that alliance. However, I’m slightly more interested in another question: is it likely to be any good as a digital currency?
For at least a couple of days, climate change has been back on the agenda with the protests happening in London by Extinction Rebellion . The coverage has fallen into the usual “adversarial” pattern: weighing the protestors’ points against the need for people to travel, or asking whether it is hypocritical that some protestors arrived by car / train / plane. Fundamentally, the point has been…
Many of us deal with personal and sensitive data these days. Best practice in computing circles is to make use of “encryption at rest”: ensuring data remains secure by encrypting it on a device (whether it’s a laptop, mobile phone or USB key). Some researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands have discovered that widely used data storage devices with self-encrypting drives don’t do the job…
For those who aren’t from the UK, the “High Street” is what we call the shopping parade in a typical town or city. It lies at the heart of the town, quite different to a mall, and is more of a European concept. “Cascade failure” is what we say when one part of a system causes another part of the system to fail, often like a set of dominoes falling. Putting two and two together: I believe that the…
No doubt many people will have read the story about how an error in a piece of software has prevented a number of women being invited to a standard screening. The current estimate is that this could have led to as many as 270 lives being lost or curtailed , although it will be difficult to say for some time. As a ex-CTO in a healthcare business, this is the type of problem that used to keep me…
My estimable Twitter-pal Paul Johnson has put together a very reasonable thread about his thinking on serverless costs (ie. AWS Lambda, in this case). He makes a great case for the design of functions being done in such a way as to allow cost efficiency improvements, and I think the point on architecture is generally well-made. However, there are a few aspects of this which I think are generally…
Steven Sinofsky of a16z (previously Microsoft) probably first coined the phrase, “Don’t ship the org chart”. I think there’s a new variant of this worth discussing: shipping the microservices. I’ve been reviewing a few products in depth recently for different reaasons, and once you see it, it actually becomes really obvious.
There are few options in the cloud that are really worth investing time in. Amazon (AWS) is clearly important as the market leader, and Google Cloud (GCP) offers a variety of very interesting technology. Microsoft (Azure) has some remarkable technology, especially for Windows-oriented shops. After that, options are much smaller scale: there are big names like IBM (BlueMix) to much newer startups…
Everyone is now talking about the CPU security problems that are now being fully disclosed: they’re dubbed Meltdown and Spectre . Meltdown is a problem that mainly or entirely affects Intel CPUs, but Spectre is a problem that affects all designs. 
 I haven’t seen any “explain it like I’m 5” on the Spectre paper yet, so here’s my take. Sadly, it’s not 5-year-old level, but I’ve tried to make it…
I just listened to “Troubleshooting Agile”, a new audio series from CTO Craft contributor Douglas Squirrel and his podcast partner Jeffrey Fredrick. The first edition is on blameless culture, which I think is a great starting point: it’s very difficult to develop, and taking baby steps toward that in a team which doesn’t have it often feels wrong.
Sam Altman has published a thoughtful piece about what was previously called the Singularity, which he now refers to as The Merge . I’m not sure these concepts are quite the same – the traditional Singularity was less a statement about humanity than a theory that, at some point, the improvement of intelligence of machines is sufficiently fast that it becomes pointless to predict the future. “The…
Gosh, I wish I was at re:Invent. Personally, I don’t like the States much (the place is great; getting through the airports is an exercise in frustration) and while I’ve never been to Las Vegas there isn’t much that ordinarily attracts me to the place. But, to have so many incredible people in one place – amazing. 
 For those – like me – not there, what do the announcements today mean? I’m not…
This evening’s RedMonk article on linguistic prescriptivism is, as usual, excellent reading. Does it matter what people call things? Is the intent behind the name something significant, which should be respected? 
 In computer science we “have form” on this subject. The names or symbols we assign to things are very clearly different from the values involved. We might write 2.0 or 1.999... ,…
It has been just over a week since I wrote that software architecture is failing , which received a level of response I didn’t expect. The reason I wrote the post in the first place was to set the scene for some future posts I want to write: as I said, I don’t think we talk enough about architecture for SMEs particularly, and I want to spend some time focussing on those. This post described the…
Everyone wants faster Continuous Integration (CI). The quicker you can get from commit to test results, the better – but there’s a bit of tension here. A CI should start close to “first principles”, so that you know an entire build is good and repeatable. But the more work the CI is doing, the slower it will go. 
 I’ve mentioned before that I use a combination of stowage and container-based CI…
On social media right now, strong rumours are spreading that the WPA2 encryption scheme has been broken in a fundamental way. What this means: the security built into WiFi is likely ineffective, and we should not assume it provides any security. 
 The current name I’m seeing for this is “KRACK”: Key Reinstallation AttaCK. If this is true, it means third parties will be able to eavesdrop on…
I doubt there has ever been a time when software architecture was seen as a raging success. The “three-tier architecture” of the web has held up extremely well and is an excellent place for many people to start. The “12 Factor App” approach has encouraged developers to adopt practices that make deployment and scaling much simpler. Over the last couple of years, though, I’ve noticed developers…
RedMonk published a great article today on the incompleteness of technical debt as a metaphor. This touches on a number of points, the best one I think is that for many people in business, debt just isn’t a “bad per se” thing. Technical debt, more often than not, is. 
 I completely agree with the analysis. Presenting technical debt as risk is a more accurate picture a lot of the time. While…
Millions of words are expended on software architecture. Fashions come and go; some patterns last a long time, others are a flash in the pan. One day, Model-View-Controller is all the rage. The next, it’s Model-View-ViewModel. So on and so forth – the next new architecture is the One True Way or a genuine silver bullet, until it’s not, at which point it’s legacy, technical debt or code smell.…
Last week I gave a lightning talk, ostensibly on Kubernetes / docker / prometheus, to a motley crew of London CTOs. I rarely give talks these days, so of course I ran over massively. There’s so much I’ve learned, and my teams have learned, attempting to force a discussion like this into a lightning format feels trite (in retrospect). 
 There’s a key reason for this. In my talk, I called it the…
I wrote a couple of times previously about Symfony 4, particularly the architecture and use of Makefiles . It’s now at the point of being testable, so I took it for a short spin. 
 One comment for Linux users: your operating system will probably need an upgrade. I’m a Fedora user, and the stable release only includes PHP 7.0. Although that’s recent, it’s not good enough. Thankfully Fedora 26…
It’s interesting watching history repeat itself. There are a number of fashions that come and go in technology: thin client computing comes back every twenty years or so, for example. In the 80s, Unix was very big – it faded a bit in the nineties but then came roaring back with Linux. 
 Another venerable bit of software is coming back into fashion – good old Make. It’s not the perfect tool by…
People sometimes ask me about the structure of our internal development team, and to what extent we’re truly “agile”. My response is that we’re actually more “lean”. I happily give examples of some of the key working practices we have. I generally don’t explain the difference between “lean” and “agile”, though. 
 Sometimes, people use these terms interchangeably. I think this is wrong, but…
Coming up with convincing vision and mission in a corporate environment is never easy – in fact, I think it’s one of the most difficult things you can do. Setting a clear and crisp vision is crucial to create an aligned organisation. Refining down into an elevator-pitch sized statement while avoiding generalisations, platitudes and (frankly) abstract jibberish is practically impossible. 
…
Explaining Serverless technology 
 If you’re an IT or business leader, you’ve probably heard about serverless. Forward-thinking organisations are planning for servless now, because it’s a big change to how we build software. You don’t need deep tech knowledge to understand why – there’s nothing mystical about serverless. I’m going to explain what this is in simple terms and how it will affect…
It was only just over a week ago that I posted about brand being the net result of action , and in the last few days United Airlines have decided to furnish me with the best example yet . 
 There’s nothing that speaks more volumes than how a company treats its customers, and while it’s not the case that all their customers are treated this poorly, the fact they will go this low is shocking.
It’s always interesting reading how other people view strategy, and Vince Law’s WTF is Strategy? is a very entertaining read. Like a lot of my posts, it’s quite digital product-oriented, but I think these principles are pretty general and should apply for most people. 
 What is interesting is that one of the examples he uses – taking a road-trip across the States – is exactly an example that I…
Back in 2010 I wrote a post about Canonical’s business direction , in response to something Bradley Kuhn had posted. Both he and I were worried about Canonical becoming reliant on an “open core” business model – worried not just from the perspective that it would dilute the principle of Ubuntu, but that frankly every time I have seen this executed before it has been a dismal failure. 
 The…
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…
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…
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 /…
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: 
 
…
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…
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.