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Below are my articles covering all elements of engineering, business and technology.
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Cigars et al.

Lightspeed

A couple of years ago I started smoking cigars more often and they’ve turned out to be one of the genuinely enjoyable things in life - one of those small, civilised pleasures that makes the whole enterprise feel worth it.

That wasn’t always the case. I’d tried cigars when I was younger and they never really connected with me. At the time, the downsides - and yes, obviously there are downsides - didn’t seem worth it.

directorystore forgerock ldap

business architecture

Shifted Sands

2025 was a hard year for most people I know. I won’t claim to know the exact cause - although I believe economic pressure and broader societal decay contribute - but stress, negativity and outright pain was widespread. It showed up everywhere and it showed up for the people I care about.

Personally, 2025 was the year I retreated to the bunker I’d been building for a few years. Not a literal bunker as that breaks planning regulations, but an isolated position of financial and operational safety. I’d rather not be in the bunker, but I built it for a reason and I’m glad I did.

change finance career

technical business

SRE vs DevOps

Earlier this week, I saw a post asking about the differences between Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps. I got a bit carried away with my response and hit the LinkedIn comment character limit, so I decided to turn it into a long-term post. This way, it can be a lasting resource, just like my Helm and Windows articles.

devops sre devex

technical business

Surviving Windows

Windows is still the desktop OS of choice for enterprises across the globe yet the vast majority of server operating systems are either Linux or BSD. Only a small contingent of server installations are Windows Server most of which host Microsoft specific applications such as Exchange. Doing development for Linux destined applications on a Windows desktop can be a huge chore, especially when you don’t have admin access to cheat your way via WSL or super user permissions.

Here’s a survival list that I’ve cobbled together covering both admin and non-admin setups.

development windows devex

technical

What is done

Done is a relative concept. The majority of the project/programme/initiatives I’ve been part of have included effort towards agreeing the formal definition of done, whether that’s part of a Programme Kickoff or within a Statement of Work. However, where Statement of Work approaches are explicit and robust, project approaches are disconnected and occasionally delusional.

productivity

business non-technical

Serverless

Serverless technologies are the greatest marketing achievement in cloud computing. They’re incredibly useful overall, but they’re also nearly as oversubscribed as VPN services and likely the most front loaded service type out there. How do you use serverless tech without getting bitten in a couple years?

cloud architecture technical

business technical

Helm

I’ve been running Kubernetes for years both professionally and personally. My on-premises K8s cluster has been going over half a decade. To manage these clusters I’ve used Terraform, Ansible, Kustomize, Helm, Flux, plain manifests and even my own tooling in jinny. Out of all of them, Helm is the only tool which I can’t recommend. I haven’t encountered a scenario where Helm has resulted in a net benefit, it has always been better to pick something else. Let’s explore!

helm kubernetes

development technical

Pipelines: A Bundle of Opinions

Continuous Integration / Deployment / Development / Delivery are high level objectives found at most organisations. The majority of SoWs that I’ve worked to included CICD implementation or the implementation of continuous CICD improvement which is continuously doing whatever-is-being-done. My experience has been that firms just want better and more reliable pipelines. Everyone is sick of seeing pipelines mysteriously fail.

pipelines development technical

development technical

Should it cloud?

I’ve been wrestling a horde of Macs, herding them into a flock of standardised, well trained beasts that are able to handle iOS builds in a somewhat predictable pattern. It’s not my favourite experience but, like mortality, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. In order to get to this point I’ve fallen back on some old standbys like Ansible and Bash.

cloud unhappy

architecture cloud

Infrastructure as Code

I’ve been on another loop around Infrastructure as Code tools, initiated by multiple explorations hunting for the appropriate tool to fit various clients culture and strategy. All of the below tools I’ve taken for a full run deploying to production, ie fully released commercial software has been deployed by all the tools below directly by yours truly. I thought it best to note down the impressions of each whilst I’ve still got the wounds.

technical cloud code

technical cloud

What is a Directory Store?

Directory stores are ancient software that fit within a particular use case that’s not commonly found across the rest of software development - storing a directory of entities that are accessible by grouping and heritage. That’s a more mature way of saying that directory stores are digital phone-books. Primarily they’re used for things like Microsoft’s Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, Jumpcloud’s LDAP, ForgeRock’s OpenDS and most other services that manage hierarchical data such as people. Directory Stores were originally designed for organising, categorising and grouping people. However, the way they store and manage data could be used for general data management for any number of applications. Let’s have a look.

directorystore forgerock ldap

business architecture