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Writing

Articles on technology, leadership, training and the things I'm still learning, including the parts that didn't work.

One need became four Jira skills, plus ones nobody knew about. After: one central repository, a check on anything from outside, and the best versions folded back in.
Leadership

Four Jira skills

When agent adoption outran any shared answer, our engineers built their own. At the worst point there were four versions of one Jira skill. What it took to get back to one, and why I would do it first next time.

24 SEP 26 8 MIN
Four nested bands around a single change: one desk inside one team inside your customers inside irreversible, with only the outermost picked out.
Leadership

Blast radius

AI-assisted coding has moved the cost side of build against buy, and it keeps moving. What it has not moved is who is answerable when the thing fails. Four questions, four bands, and the guards that go with each.

18 SEP 26 9 MIN
One deployable containing a money-movement core with its own database, and four peripheral modules beside it, separated by a dashed line marked published interfaces, in process.
Technology

The monolith that moves money

Splitting a payments system into services solves an organisational problem and creates an accounting one. What I would keep in one place, what M-PESA did when it hit the same wall, and what SRE looks like when the language is Python.

18 SEP 26 11 MIN