Is it Imperative to be Declarative?

    Recently, in Container Solutions’ engineering Slack channel, a heated argument ensued amongst our engineers after a Pulumi-related story was posted. I won’t recount the hundreds of posts in the thread...

    Software Security Field Guide for the Bewildered

    If you have worked your way in software for a number of years and you’re not a security specialist, you might be occasionally confronted by someone from ‘security’ who generally says ‘no’ to things yo...

    15 min read

    Cloud Repatriation Trends: Where Are We Now?

    A typically controversial post from the CTO of 37signals about moving HEY’s servers out of the cloud has re-ignited the debates around cloud repatriation. To say that ‘opinion is divided’ would be to ...

    6 min read

    Case Study: Cloud Native Finance at CS

    The finance team at CS has recently automated a bunch of repetitive manual work with the aid of some custom Python, Apache Beam, and Google Cloud Functions. But how did we get here?

    Podcast: Syntasso COO Paula Kennedy on Platform Team Responsibilities, Patterns and Anti-patterns

    Charles Humble talks to Paula Kennedy about the rise of platforms. They discuss platform definitions; common anti-patterns and how to guard against them at both a team and organisational level; provin...

    Frictionless Security: Balancing Infosec and DevEx

    The balance between Information Security (Infosec) and a good Developer Experience (DevEx) is a crucial aspect of modern-day businesses. Whilst Infosec is crucial for the protection of sensitive data ...

    Observability Culture: How to Gain Understanding Across the Organisation

    I’ve spent the last three years at cinch establishing a culture of observability, but what does that mean?

    Dashbored: Stop Looking at the Same Tired Data

    Dashboards are everywhere. Every service needs a dashboard, every team uses at least one dashboard. We have high-level dashboards, low-level dashboards, platform dashboards, infrastructure dashboards,...

    Do Not Negotiate Quality

    I should say before we start that I’m aware that, rather sadly, “Clean Coder” Bob Martin has become rather a problematic figure in our industry. It also pains me to write about the importance of well-...