Making technical demos more engaging

You've completed the sprint - the goal was hit and you're ready to demo your new changes! But it's only you and the product owner who have turned up to the session - the other stakeholders "couldn't make it". You continue with your slides showing code samples and architecture diagrams to show how your cool … Continue reading Making technical demos more engaging →

When RAG statuses go bad

We can tell when the use of a RAG status is going to be ineffective - when the statuses haven't been defined. If we don't give definitions to what red, amber, and green mean then things can start to unravel later on. In this post I suggest three ways a RAG status can be misused … Continue reading When RAG statuses go bad →

White paper on the secret sharing implementation in Hashicorp’s Vault

Securing a secret, whether it's a password, sensitive information or a cryptographic key, is hard to get right. Hashicorp's Vault attempts to remove the headaches by providing simple APIs no matter what form the storage back-end takes. I have just finished a report which looks into part of the implementation of Vault to show the mechanisms used to protect user's … Continue reading White paper on the secret sharing implementation in Hashicorp’s Vault →

Stop trying to solve hard problems!

Earlier this week I had a discussion about the running time of an algorithm used to test a method. This got me thinking about one of my favourite areas of computer science - computational complexity. We can use complexity theory to split problems into classes. Understanding some of these classes can help us to recognise when … Continue reading Stop trying to solve hard problems! →

Velocity 2015, 2: System Design = Organisation Design

This is the second of a series of posts covering what I learnt at Velocity Amsterdam 2015. During the second day, Mike Amundsen of CA Technologies shared his insights into the works of Melvin Conway. While Conway's Law may be well known, it is only stated as the thesis of his article "How do committees invent?". Mike showed that … Continue reading Velocity 2015, 2: System Design = Organisation Design →

Velocity 2015, 1: Keeping Secrets Secret

I was fortunate enough to attend Velocity in Amsterdam this year, which followed several major themes - one of which being security. This post was inspired by a presentation given by Alex Schoof entitled "Managing Secrets at Scale". Alex covered many areas, including how to control the use of secrets, how they can be made highly available … Continue reading Velocity 2015, 1: Keeping Secrets Secret →