Building and running an effective engineering organisation is not an easy task. In fact, it's very very hard. It's easy to evolve into an organisational structure and for the process to be iterative but, hands down, it's the most important part of any effective tech business. Over the years I've…
The problem with leader-follower It's very tempting in a leadership position to put yourself in front of the team, become the key decision maker, the linchpin, and make yourself look and feel important. When this strategy becomes successful, two things tend to happen. Positive reinforcement means that most leaders will…
I've made every mistake possible in the last six month since I moved into my new role as Director of Engineering at Opentable. Leading a team of any size is not easy but leading multiple teams, if not done properly, can feel like herding cats. People always say that management…
Team dynamic is incredibly important to the success of a project but often overlooked and assumed that simply having talented engineers is good enough. Forming teams is extremely difficult but it should be a conscious effort. Just putting skillsets together is not good enough because personalities and people matter. Creative…
What is Service Discovery? Service discovery is the concept of separating how processes and services find and communicate with one another. Typically this involves each service/node announcing themselves, some form of storage of the name and host/port of the service, and the ability to query (discover) this data…
It still amazes and confuses me that only the minority of tech companies are actually focussed on how they can provide a culture and environment that developers truly want to work in. They look at recruitment techniques that completely miss the point and misunderstand what attracts (and keeps) truly great…