The AI-Native 2/20 Software Product Peloton

1 Apr '26 | Thought Experiment

LLMs can deliver massive individual productivity gains, especially for senior engineers, and prior ideas around software product team structures now seem to create bottlenecks. I haven’t seen many ideas on...

LLMs as the new processor

4 Nov '24 | Code Collective Talk

This talk introduced LLMs to software developers as a new kind of processor with remarkable capabilities, framed within the history of computing. It began with a brief overview of the...

Software best practice is dead

21 Nov '17 | ASAS and SDN Netherlands Talk

Treating your mature enterprise product carelessly will get your business into deep trouble, but gold plating a new product, before you are sure that you are building the right thing,...

Understanding software engineering with equations

9 Oct '17 | Codemotion Berlin Talk

In order to escape the common traps of software development, teams and managers need to understand the consequences of their decisions - they need to understand the dynamics of software...

What is software product design?

10 Mar '17 | DevConf Talk

Although software engineering has become crucial to our modern society, it is still a new and often misunderstood discipline. One of the most harmful misconceptions is that programming and testing...

Hybrid vs native mobile tech stack

16 Jul '16 | JSinSA Talk

Choosing the wrong mobile tech stack sets you up for a world of pain. But how do you select the right one from a plethora of current options? As an...

Rescuing Legacy Software from Impending Doom

22 Jun '16 | Agile Washington DC, Agile Australia

Dealing with an ageing code base is one of the hardest challenges that software development teams face. Legacy code bases can slow teams to a crawl, and therefore it is...

Essential software engineering reading list

12 Mar '16

Here is a list of classic articles and books that have informed my thinking on software engineering. This list does not include my list of (great) programming, philosophy or management...

How to become a thought leader in software

12 Aug '15

“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” — Victor Hugo “Am I going to be bored or enlightened?” was the question I asked before attending Agile...

Self-help books meta-summary

31 Dec '14

As a software engineering coach part of my job is to help teams become more effective. To this end, it is sometimes useful to employ concepts from self-help books, but...

Is fast typing required for developers?

6 Dec '14

I changed my mind on this recently, and here’s why. There is a sentiment that developers have to type really fast because we “type code for a living”. I’ve long...

The origin of bug, loop and patch

3 Aug '14

Bug, loop and patch - these words have been part of programmer lingo for decades. On my recent trip to the US east coast I stumbled across their origin: The...