I was recently in a conversation on social media about the role of a software engineer. As a SWE, what you bring to the table is knowledge of efficient algorithms and data structures for general computation.

I’m frequently asked what resources I’ve found most useful on my learning journey. Here are my recommendations for both technical and non-technical people who want to improve organizational outcomes.

Continuous Delivery requires an entirely different mindset from classical artisanal delivery. For example, we always prioritize operations over development. If we cannot deploy something to our production environment, then nothing else matters.

When starting on the journey to agility, the most common path is for an organization to hire a Certified Agile Consultant™ and learn about the Manifesto for Agile Software Development followed by Scrum.

Continuous delivery is a powerful tool for delivering changes safely, reliably, and more frequently with less toil and burnout. CD is also the best tool for uncovering why we can’t do these.

I’ve been a developer for a while. I’ve delivered using every industry fad that management has bought into. In 2003, the organization I worked for wanted to bring some discipline to our ad hoc processes so they sent senior developers and team managers to PMI training to become certified project managers.

There are many common three-letter acronyms (TLAs) used in the software industry; TDD (Test Driven Development), BDD (Behavior Driven Development), DDD (Domain Driven Design), etc.

Whenever we want to solve a problem or build something useful, we have decisions to make about the tools we choose.

Hope creep is the plague of value delivery. We assume that since something worked in the past it will work again.

I was talking to a friend the other day about how her management is tracking teams’ “maturity” using “DORA Metrics”, the four measures the correlate with high-performing organizations mentioned by DevOps Research and Assessment in “Accelerate” and the State of DevOps reports.