Coach

Coaching conversations using the GROW Model

Are you a people leader, someone whose role involves a lot of influencing others to work towards objectives? Are you a mentor to someone who is at your level or junior whom you are helping navigate their career? Anyone in either of these roles will have conversations that help their coachee/mentee identify goals that matter to them, realise what needs to be done to get there, reflect on what and how they have been doing so far and to encourage them to get to their goals consistently. That is the role of a coach. This sounds like something that is relatively easy to do. But in my experience, it is not. ...

April 18, 2022 · 7 min · 1428 words
Trust

Leadership, trust and how not to ruin it

Featured image courtesy https://www.pexels.com/photo/ground-group-growth-hands-461049/ Are you a people leader in a company? What do I mean by a people leader? It is someone who is in charge of managing people and their development, ensuring those people in your care have the room to grow and get the recognition and opportunities they deserve. This is a very difficult role as it is not meant for the selfish. To lead is a unique responsibility where you take ownership of your team’s mistakes while giving credit and celebrating their wins. To lead in a way, is to serve. ...

March 26, 2022 · 18 min · 3749 words
Git

What are Git submodules?

What are submodules in git? If you have worked in software development, you have certainly been developing your application using libraries or packages developed by others, whether it is open-source or not. It could be that your project A depends on a project B both of which are from different git repositories in your organisation. What happens when you want to be able to treat the two projects as separate yet still be able to use one from within the other? ...

February 19, 2022 · 3 min · 582 words
Scrum feedback loop

What is Agile Scrum?

Agile ways of working In today’s world, every software company claims to be agile. This post is a condensed version of the official Scrum Guide. I have not changed the intent of the guide but have added context based on my experience and removed details where I felt it was obvious. However it is true that what is obvious to me may not be obvious to another person. So if something in this post doesn’t agree with your understanding of scrum, please read the scrum guide. ...

February 14, 2022 · 13 min · 2587 words
Quality Scrabble

Building software quality from Day 1 using Lean Quality Assurance

In my current role, I manage a very special team of quality engineers who are responsible for setting standards and best practices for quality assurance across the entire organisation and is also responsible for developing any necessary tooling or frameworks that might help product teams reduce toil. This is not a new problem and hence I was looking for inspiration and lessons to learn from other organisations who have embedded quality at the heart of their software development process. I came across this presentation by two Quality Specialists who also happen to be Atlassian partners. Please go ahead and watch it if you haven’t already. ...

January 30, 2022 · 6 min · 1237 words
oh my bash

Customize your Mac or Linux prompt or terminal

Do you have a MacOs laptop? I am not an Apple fan. In fact, I have in the past, bought a Macbook Pro and returned it within the first fourteen days as I felt that what I got was not worth the price. However, as I have mentioned several times in the past in this blog, my career started on Linux and hence I do like and feel really comfortable navigating the command line. As part of my current role though, I am not coding on a daily basis but primarily helping create an environment where my engineers can be more productive every day. ...

January 23, 2022 · 2 min · 299 words
SRE

Site Reliability Engineering vs Devops: What are they? How do they differ?

What is SRE? SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering. That’s just a lot of words. What does it mean though? Site Reliability engineering is what IT operations would be if it was run by software engineers. That’s an interesting take. But it was not helpful in clarifying anything about SRE just yet. Let’s try probing more. How did we go from Development to SRE? You know the part where people deploy software and then ensure things run fine in production. ...

December 4, 2021 · 14 min · 2849 words
Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory for Developers: What you need to know

This is a long read and I spent a pretty long time going through videos and articles compiling this into one post. Not something I would have done usually. But I do think that sometimes having it all in one place is easier to access than splitting into multiple articles. I hope the TOC helps group things. Azure AD is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. Lots of words. But do they make sense? ...

October 23, 2021 · 12 min · 2357 words
Azure Functions

How to use complex settings in Azure Functions using Options pattern and Dependency injection

I only recently found out about this, so I had to share it immediately. I have been using the Values section in the local.settings.json in a not-recommended way for some time. Application settings in the local.settings.json has some naming restrictions which I have been ignoring as the way I used it seemed to work. The docs said: Values must be strings and not JSON objects or arrays. Setting names can't include a colon (:) or a double underline (__). ...

October 22, 2021 · 2 min · 345 words
System Design

Azure functions with Swagger and OpenAPI

What is OpenAPI specification? This is a specification for machine-readable interface files for describing, producing, consuming and visualizing RESTful web services. Apparently, this was earlier part of the Swagger framework, it became a separate project sometime in 2016 overseen by the Open API initiative, an open-source collaboration project of the Linux Foundation. I am not trying to sound clever here. That’s all taken from wikipedia as I just wanted to give you an idea of what it is without having to leave this post. ...

September 19, 2021 · 5 min · 952 words