Explore key platform truths in DevOps and cloud engineering to provide a foundation for efficient, scalable, and maintainable platforms ..read more

This post is focused on GitHub reusable workflows and some of the ways I've put them to use in my designs ..read more

A colleague once asked me if I had a bias for action. And I’ll admit that it really gave me pause. I personally feel that I’m particularly experienced and motivated to enter situations that have stalled or stagnated and inject fresh energy and decision making into the mix. And that, generally, the results are favorable. I had not really sat down to think through my decision making matrix and write it down before. This is my attempt at explaining my core decision making process. Chaos My happy place is in the chaos of design, the space that exists where answers have not yet been found. This can ..read more

In Platform Engineering with Vending Machines, Contracts, and Pipelines, I state that “building a platform capable of scale means planning for scale in the first place.” This post will go deeper into the idea of vending machines by looking at the creation, management, and operations around inputs and outputs that feed the work. We’ll start with an overview of what Dynamic Configuration is to me, transitioning to various design patterns I’ve created in production and weighing in on the pros and cons of each. Overview Set a course for adventure! Platforms need to scale across the Sphere of Key S ..read more

Building a platform capable of scale means planning for scale in the first place. For me, this comes down to the formation of contracts – specifically platform and service contracts – and then using vending machines and pipelines to ensure the contracts are enforced and consistent. This post provides some thoughts on each of these constructs, how I use them, and where they fit together. This pattern has served me well in designing and building platforms used by developers in a domain-driven model with multiple daily deployments. With that said, your company’s org chart (silos) will have a huge ..read more

The full title of this book is “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better” but felt a little long for the blog post title. ? A colleague of mine recommended this book to me after my first public sector project. Originally I had scratched my head around a number of behaviors and decisions that I witnessed in government work. There seemed to be a pretty major disconnect between “these are the laws and policies being passed” and “these are the systems and processes that translate those laws and policies into actionable outcomes.” Policy and delivery ..read more

This blog is focused on solutioning versus problem solving. Most people seem to think these two are the same thing. They are not. What are problems? Let’s dig into the idea of a problem as a reference point. A problem is something that isn’t what it should be. Something doesn’t make sense, or perhaps it operates inefficiently. Something breaks or flakes or shakes the wrong way. In general, problems can be solved from two directions: obviation (removal) or abstraction (acceptance). Everything in between is nuance of the two and can be boiled down to one or the other when an atomic unit of “prob ..read more

In Lessons I’ve Learned Leading a Platform Engineering Team, I tease out various learnings that I wanted to capture for future me. And that’s all well and good if you have the context and experience in designing, building, and maintaining platforms. But most folks do not. This post aims to address how Platform Engineering works in the real world. I’ll do my best to break down the important bits. Guiding Principles of Platform Engineering You and your organization want to build something. That something is a piece of software. So, you gather up a bunch of people who know how to build software a ..read more

In What Great Architects Actually Do, I listed a number of opinions on the topic. Here’s one more: great architects always seek feedback Not sometimes. Not usually. Not in specific use cases. Always. Why? Your first idea is going to suck in some way Face it, it’s true. If you could wave your hands in the air and magically come up with a perfect solution, you would not be a human being. I certainly can’t. My 3rd version of something is usually when I start getting confident that I’m going in the right direction. I’ve found that the scale of a problem has little impact on this truth. There are t ..read more

I lead a Platform Engineering team in my day job. My specific expertise is in public sector (government) work at enterprise scale. This comes with a very interesting and unique set of requirements and constraints. It’s not an easy job, but I do very much enjoy it and get to work with great people. It feels really good to directly impact citizens and their communities with well designed and operated technology. These are some lessons I’ve learned while building highly secure platforms in this environment. But first, a rant about Platform Engineering Since vendors love to steal terms and then to ..read more