Software Engineers

Software delivery has changed a lot over the years! What’s the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment? 🤔 And is a feature live just because it’s deployed? 🤨 Let’s look into this together with some modern DevOps 🚀 🌳 Trunk-Based Development Trunk-based development (TBD) is a software development strategy where everyone works from a single branch (trunk) — usually main. It’s fast, lean, and fits in modern delivery practices. 🔧 How it works: Developers commit to main (or short-lived branches that are merged quickly to the main branch) The main branch is always deployable Features are hidden behind flags until they’re ready to go live 🚀 💡 Why it matters: Trunk-based development encourages: ...

When writing code, we often want to know how fast it runs ⏩ and how much memory it uses 💾. This is where time complexity and space complexity comes in! Let’s break these down using Pokémon themed examples! 🔥 ⚡ Big O Notation - The Trainer’s Guide 📖 Big O notation helps us understand how an algorithm scales as the input size grows. Think of it as training a Pokémon: some level up quickly ⚡, while others take longer ⏳! ...

If you’ve ever watched Severance on Apple TV, you know that it’s a very interesting and addictive show that explores the concept of “severance” — a procedure that separates your work-life memories from your personal memories 🧑‍💼💼 But have you ever thought about how Severance could be compared to virtualisation techniques? 🤔 Let’s do an interesting comparison between the human mind and computer systems together, using concepts like partitioning and virtualisation 🚀 ...

Building a strong and cohesive team is not easy, whether it’s in software engineering or e-sports! Let’s talk about Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development, using the famous T1 League of Legends team as an example. This e-sports team has gone through all the ups and downs of team development, and their journey is a great lesson for us in the tech world. Let’s break it down and see how T1 went from the Forming stage to the Performing stage—and why keeping your team together, upskilling, and believing in internal promotion is key to success! 🚀 ...

K-pop has evolved dramatically over the years, with new generations of idols pushing the boundaries of what we know about the industry. If we take a step back, we can notice an interesting parallel between the growth of K-pop groups and the way we develop software 😄! From the early days of K-pop groups like SES and Girls Generation to the global groups of BLACKPINK and BTS, K-pop groups have undergone a major transformation. This journey can be compared to the shift from monolithic systems to microservices in the tech world! 🤖💻 ...

DevOps is like a bread maker 🍞🐱‍🏍 it takes a variety of inputs, processes them, and produces a final product with minimal manual intervention. Just like how you add ingredients to a bread maker (flour, yeast, sugar, etc. 🍰), DevOps involves providing code, infrastructure, and automation to produce a continuous flow of delivery. Let’s break down the 3 fundamentals of DevOps and explore some best practices using the bread maker analogy! ...

The world of software engineering is constantly evolving, and so is the technology we use to build software. Artificial Intelligence tools, like GitHub Copilot, have rapidly emerged as valuable assistants in the software development process. But it’s essential to remember that AI is a tool and not the driver. It is the software engineer who remains in control, using AI as a helpful co-pilot rather than relying on it to lead and drive the way. ...

Why should we promote a pairing culture? 🌳 Pairing offers numerous valuable benefits that help enhance team dynamics and professional growth 🌴: Knowledge Exchange and Growth 💚 Mentoring and reverse-mentoring Accelerated skill development 💹 Effective knowledge transfer Team Development 💛 Enhanced communication skills Stronger collaborative relationships Faster onboarding of new members Organisational Benefits ☕ Elimination of knowledge silos Continuous team up-skilling Improved project outcomes through shared expertise As part of the PaaS team at Xero, when managing core CI/CD tooling, our team frequently encounters diverse customer requests 😎. While balancing these support responsibilities with our planned sprint work, we sometimes face challenging situations, including: ...

How Team Topologies Relates to the Different Positions Played in League of Legends In both software development and competitive gaming, effective team structure and collaboration are critical to achieving success. Whether you are managing a sofware engineering team or playing a game of League of Legends (LoL), how you organise your team and define roles impacts the overall performance and outcome. In this blog, I’m going to draw an interesting comparison between Team Topologies: a framework used to define and optimise team structures in modern software engineering, and the positions in League of Legends. While one is about creating scalable and efficient software, and the other is about winning a fast-paced game, the principles of collaboration, specialised roles, and strategic alignment remain the same. If you haven’t read the book: Team Topologies yet, please checkout my previous blog post on book recommendations where it has more information about this blog and why you should read it! ...

Benefits 🦘 Infrastructure Automation | HashiCorp Developer I prepared for the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate certification, which is about: Fundamentals of Terraform: The certification covers core concepts and skills related to Terraform, including infrastructure as code (IaC), basic Terraform commands, and the ability to manage and deploy infrastructure using Terraform 📝 Practical Application: It focuses on practical knowledge, such as creating and managing Terraform configurations, understanding the Terraform workflow, and applying best practices for writing and organising Terraform code ⭐ How I prepared books (~ 6 weeks) HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate Practice Exam What is HCP Terraform? | Terraform | HashiCorp Developer I created a weekly schedule to study one practice exam per week. There are 5 practice exams and one final exam available which is slightly different: Terraform Fill-In-The-Blank Questions. ...