Martin Coughlan

When people ask me if I think AI will make software developers redundant in the next few years I think about the tiny amount of code out there that is easy to understand and change over time. Given how we still struggle to write simple CRUD based applications that are easy to evolve to meet the next challenge and we are teaching AI based on this data set heavily weighted towards mediocrity I don't worry that good developers will have no work.

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If you're interested in: → A journey from Electronic Engineering -> full stack web development → Insight into how we foster autonomy and empowerment at Sensoteq → Practical tips to maximally leverage AI, particularly in software This might be worth a listen 😉

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Are we really that aligned? 🤔 Ash Patel and I have been discussing very similar ideas in our last episodes of our Reliability Enablers podcast. 🎙️ 🔍 We delve into key topics such as: - Future focus areas for SRE practitioners - Importance of teaching reliability engineering practices in educational institutions - The necessity of a Ben (Chief Reliability Officer) in organizations One standout question came from Jennifer Petoff - Is Google SRE learning from other industry practitioners? 💡 Tune in to the intriguing discussion with guest Benjamin Treynor Sloss and co-host Steve McGhee on the latest episode of the Google SRE Prodcast. 🎧 #Alignment #SRE #TechTalks

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Interesting discussion with Dave Farley and Emily Bache. There are a lot of things that I agree with in it, however the one main sticking point that I have is that a true "engineer" in the more common incarnations, Mechanical, Civil, etc, require registration and licensing from a local state/district and/or governing body. I'd LOVE for programming to have such a system, but we currently don't. That's one reason why I settle with code craft and call myself a crafter. I agree it's not a perfect term, but to me its better than giving the false impression that there's a standard of skillset or understanding like other engineering disciplines. What do you think? https://lnkd.in/gXqmkden

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I have always found complex systems fascinating. Even after moving from Physics to tech I noticed that I would enjoy debugging systems more than building them. If you model people as complex systems - which they are - then interviewing is quite similar to debugging. I have found adopting a similar scientific approach in interviewing to be quite an effective strategy. Longer write up: https://lnkd.in/e_f4aACp

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I came across an interesting article about leadership this morning, what it means and how two main different styles shape lives and organisations. During my career I witnessed both approaches that are portrayed in this article. While I wholeheartedly agree with the author, my personal experience is that the autocratic, command-and-control style leadership is more often rewarded with promotions than the empathic one, regardless of the cost. As a leader, please try to make sure that you don't lose your humanity. We all have only one life after all, let's work hard, be committed, deliver results and be decisive but let's not do it while imposing constant stress and fear on people around us. https://lnkd.in/eu5VKWT2

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"Legacy is just a decision made in the past with or without your participation" 🎯 Mais um belo artigo do Italo Santos trazendo algumas verdades!

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A while ago I mused about how as the world gets more complex, dealing with it has become similarly more complex - all whilst being measured by folks who prospered when times where less complex ;). Essentially, to even have parity in personal performance.. paradoxically you need to be better and more aware of your wider context. #minuteEA #entarch #enterprisearchitecture #ecosystemsarchitecture

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🚀 An opportunity is on the horizon from Goblin Rocket Engineering 🚀 They say having 10,000 hours makes you an expert in something, well I'm bringing 🕰️ 30,000 hours to the table. This is a unique opportunity to work with one of the most experienced Solutions Architects in the Sitecore space. Let me answer some of the questions you might have as to why we'd make a great team. ⏳ That's a lot of hours, what have you been doing? I've been busy helping my clients deliver their products and projects using the latest technologies, here's a few headliners for you. 💠 Composable Architecture 💠 Headless Development 💠 DevOps & Automation 💠 Cloud Engineering 💠 Containerisation 💠 Sitecore (of course) It isn't just about clients though, I love giving back to the community, it helps us progress together. Without those who shared before me, I wouldn't be the experienced and knowledgeable person I am today. Through writing blogs, creating open source libraries to presenting what I know at conferences, my contributions have helped hundreds of developers and projects. Leading me to be awarded 🏅 Sitecore MVP 5 times in a row, something I'm very proud of! 📣 I need someone to lead the charge, is that you? Yes! Whether it's a small laser focused or big broadly reaching team, my goal is always to empower those I work with so that the team grows together. With my experience I'm able to help directly engage with key stakeholders, translating their requirements into clear plans and processes to be executed by the team and budgeted accordingly. 🎛️ So you're just a Sitecore person? Absolutely not, sure I've been independently helping clients deliver amazing Sitecore solutions for the past 10 years, but it's a big ecosystem with many external facets! Being a Solutions Architect means you need to be agnostic to the technologies you work with. The same paradigms you use in one stack can be transferred over to another, just like translating a language. I'm ready to help launch your next project into the thermosphere and make sure it lands safely back to Earth like a SpaceX rocket 🚀 (most of the time). Contact me direct or check out my site to learn more https://lnkd.in/ehFGyv9p. #SolutionsArchitect #SitecoreExpert #Sitecore #DevOps #CloudInfrastructure #AzureDevOps #Azure #SoftwareEngineer

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DoubleCloud just dropped the research on Apache Kafka, where they've been digging into how many millions of rows you can ingest into a Kafka broker per cent. Using various Java Virtual Machines, DoubleCloud compares AWS and GCP, their compute generations and two CPU architectures (x86 with Intel and AMD, and ARM) So, ARM rocks. Here’re some impressive outcomes: The m7g family of compute resources, powered by Graviton 3, stands out as the top recommendation due to its superior efficiency. It outperforms the s2 and i2 families by up to 39% in certain scenarios GCP instances generally have lower efficiency than their AWS alternatives Arm instances using GCP’s Tau processors offer a 5-7% efficiency improvement over Graviton 2. If they’re available in your region, it’s a reasonable cost-saving option. The ultimate goal of the research was to find the most effective setup and achieve the best price-performance ratio for DoubleCloud’s managed service for Kafka. So if you want to focus on building killer apps, DoubleCloud can take the Kafka burden off your shoulders. Explore DoubleCloud's Managed Kafka service and with free trial option ➡️ https://lnkd.in/drJeRsY2 𝗠𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲: This research is definitely worth a look, especially if you're dealing with Kafka performance bottlenecks or spiraling infrastructure costs. Check out the full research and let me know in the comments what you think! (I'll drop the link in the comments)

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Interesting happenings … schema governance can be challenging, whether it’s breadth first or depth first, particularly if it’s your first time building graph, or as you adopt federation.

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8 times out of 10 a time boxed architectural spike will drive better decisions than workshops, RFCs and C4 diagrams. Whilst I value (very much) the things on the right, there is much higher proof from working software.

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I've got a real top tip to level up your ChatGPT prompts: Include the Flesch-Kincaid score you'd like your output to be. The quality of output from adding this goes through the roof! For more info on this, take a look at the scale on this page: https://lnkd.in/epqpNB82

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Fun little thing I discovered. Using CLI to Change npm package.json "type" to "module" or "commonjs" https://lnkd.in/esT4Js9W

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My favourite here is Number 3 - (Not) Serving as an Umbrella for Your Team. My take: + For the best solution, and motivation, everyone needs to know why, not pull tickets. + Engineers need to meet stakeholders to they have an appreciation for the human side of things + Junior devs might say "all I want to do it code", but they best gift you can give them, personally and professionally, are soft skills, time/project management skills etc. + No one works in a bubble. Shits hits fans, and lessons are learnt about working on your main project *and* managing to lend a hand putting out someone else's fire. It should be done willingly, not as a credit for the day you'll need them to do it for you, which they will. https://lnkd.in/eKvrRyFh

Threaded GUIs - in general don't do it. I regularly see posts bemoaning that here in 2024 we still have single-thead GUI toolkits. I've been seeing similar posts for a long time, and have had discussions at work about why Java Swing has an Event Dispatch Thread for all GUI events. This post is simply a reminder to myself on the best references as to why. But it goes down to this: people at Sun, who had more experience with threads and multi-CPU than just about anyone at the time, tried many times and never made it work reliably. Here are the best posts as to why: Sun VP Graham Hamilton. https://lnkd.in/eSRfFMmD Java Concurrency In Practice 9.1. Why are GUIs Single­threaded? ... Multithreaded GUI frameworks tend to be particularly susceptible to deadlock, partially because of the unfortunate interaction between input event processing and any sensible object‐oriented modeling of GUI components. Actions initiated by the user tend to "bubble up" from the OS to the application ‐ a mouse click is detected by the OS, is turned into a "mouse click" event by the toolkit, and is eventually delivered to an application listener as a higher level event such as a "button pressed" event. On the other hand, application‐initiated actions "bubble down" from the application to the OS ‐ changing the background color of a component originates in the application and is dispatched to a specific component class and eventually into the OS for rendering. Combining this tendency for activities to access the same GUI objects in the opposite order with the requirement of making each object thread‐safe yields a recipe for inconsistent lock ordering, which leads to deadlock (see Chapter 10). And this is exactly what nearly every GUI toolkit development effort rediscovered through experience. ...

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In this book Asquith foolishly throws secret documents out of the car window #Trust #FirstWorldWar #WhiteNoise or #RootCause #Culture What do you think?

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Mastering Shadow DOM interactions? Discover how Playwright simplifies automating nested elements and unblocks the secrets of Shadow DOM testing, ensuring precise targeting and reducing test flakiness effortlessly with advanced superpowers.  Explore our blog on leveraging Playwright for effective web testing with Shadow DOM at Nagarro! Stay tuned for more in this series from Bharat Garg and myself, on using Playwright to solve intricate challenges. Sincere thanks to Khimanand Upreti, Vineet Bhatt, Alok Sharma, Debaghna Mukherjee, for giving invaluable feedback in refining the content. #WebTesting #Playwright #ShadowDOM. https://lnkd.in/gSwar-bV

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Why Grilling #SeniorEngineers in #TechnicalInterviews is a Colossal Mistake Verifying #TechnicalExpertise There's a common belief that asking a seasoned engineer to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard validates their 20 years of experience. It's akin to asking Gordon Ramsay to demonstrate his culinary skills by making instant ramen—hardly a true measure of expertise.   Evaluating #ProblemSolving Abilities The classic scenario of, "Quick! Solve this puzzle while I watch you and occasionally nod!" fails to reflect how senior engineers actually tackle real-world issues. Their problem-solving often involves careful consideration, collaboration, and an understanding of business needs, rather than performing under pressure like a circus act.   Assessing #SystemDesign Skills "Let's design a system to handle millions of users in 30 minutes!" disregards the reality of system design, where context, requirements, and time to think are crucial. Expecting senior engineers to architect complex systems on the spot is unrealistic; real-world design is far more nuanced.   In conclusion, these interview methods are as effective at assessing senior engineers as a fish-climbing contest would be at identifying the best swimmer.

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