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What the Polyamorous Community Taught Me About Communication Spending time with the polyamorous community in Sydney has been an eye-opening experience. While I’m monogamous, I’ve started to adopt some of the valuable lessons they’ve learned about communication, and it’s made a big difference in how I approach my relationships. The Importance of Explicit Communication In polyamorous relationships, communication isn’t optional—it’s essential. There’s no room to shy away from discussing other partners, boundaries, and expectations because every relationship is unique and tailored to the people involved. Without clear communication, misunderstandings and hurt feelings can quickly arise. ...

Introduction In this post, I explore how to consciously design team structures and responsibilities to enable effective, sustainable software delivery. Inspired by Team Topologies, this approach emphasizes the deliberate design of team boundaries and interactions to maximize flow and minimize friction. As Team Topologies explains: “We call these consciously designed team structures team topologies, a term that acknowledges that teams should be deliberately ‘placed’ into organizations while also referring to the boundary of responsibility of each team.” ...

Introduction In the second part of this blog series inspired by Team Topologies, I explore how teams communicate and interact with one another. Effective team communication is a cornerstone of organizational success, but it’s often easier said than done. This post dives into key interaction modes and practices that can help teams strike the right balance between autonomy and collaboration, ultimately improving flow and reducing friction. 1. The Challenge of Team Communication ...

Understanding the “Constitution of Knowledge” by Jonathan Rauch Recently, I attended a Burning Man-style event that exposed me to a wide range of ideas and new ways of thinking about happiness and living life. One conversation stood out to me: how we integrate radical ideas into our society and decide which ideas to trust. This sparked my interest in Jonathan Rauch’s book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. ...

Introduction Recently, I started reading Team Topologies and quickly noticed that many of the key concepts in the book resonated deeply with my experiences at Dovetail. The most striking realization was the power of teams over individuals. This idea challenged some traditional notions of performance and productivity, highlighting that team structure and dynamics are far more important than individual brilliance. Reflecting on these concepts has helped me better understand some of the organizational issues we’ve encountered and provided a fresh lens for approaching potential solutions. This blog is the first in a series where I’ll explore the key learnings from Team Topologies and share how they relate to my own experiences. ...

Infrastructure as an Enabler, Not a Differentiator In the fast-moving world of technology, it’s easy to be drawn to the latest and greatest infrastructure solutions. But for most companies, infrastructure shouldn’t be seen as the centerpiece of innovation. Instead, it’s a critical enabler—a foundation that supports product development, rather than a driver of differentiation. Infrastructure Is Not Core to the Business Companies succeed by delivering unique, customer-centric experiences. The core of this value lies in product innovation—the features, interfaces, and improvements that users interact with directly. Infrastructure, while essential for enabling that innovation, exists in the background. It’s the scaffolding that holds everything up, not the product that defines the customer experience. ...

Rethinking Continuous Delivery Continuous Delivery is the ability to consistently ship code multiple times a day to production. It enables fast and reliable delivery of features through automation of the release process. Effective release processes have a few essential qualities: Speed: Changes should be quick to get into production. Simplicity: The process should be easy to understand. Traceability: It should be clear what was included in each release. A powerful approach to achieve these qualities is to center the release process around a build artifact. ...

I attended KubeConf 2018 in Seattle a week ago. I’ve decided to distill the core concepts that I think are important from the conference into this blog post. I can categorize what the conference was trying to push into 5 concepts: Observability is King Do 1 Thing Well Choose Tools Appropriately Everyone Needs to know Cloud Ops Be Cloud Provider Agnostic These aren’t new ideas but they were so prominent and spoken about in so many ways that they seemed novel and obvious. ...