Sion's Blog

I’m overdue an update.

I love agentic programming.

I’m forever changing my workflow as new tools are developed and better models become available.

Over the course of a few weeks, I’ve been locked in a deeply frustrating battle with my Home Assistant Thread network.

I thought it would be fun to capture my daily driving environment for the year 2026.

Introduction Building enterprise-grade AI capability isn’t a sprint.

This post is intentionally hands‑on.

In this post, I share how I use AI to augment my work as an Engineering Manager: improving my knowledge, writing better notes, challenging my own thinking, and becoming a more effective leader.

AI adoption is often framed as a tooling problem or a skills problem.

Since leaving ManyPets, I have felt a strong urge to return to code.

I’ve been diving head-first into the world of AI-driven development lately, specifically playing around with OpenCode and its agent framework.

The next wave of great products won’t be won by who ships the most elegant code.

Introduction As an Engineering Director, I’ve long been fascinated by the invisible forces that slow down software teams over time.

Today, I’d like to share my unique interaction with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s state-of-the-art language model.

Introduction This blog introduces my experience writing my first generative AI app.

Introduction Unsplash: Markus Spiske When people learn that I became the head of engineering of a leading UK insurer at 35, they often express surprise and curiosity.

A blog of the same title from another author was recently shared in my company Slack, and I was about to write a reply, but I thought it would help if I wrote my response in long form.

Unsplash: Avery Evans I.

Introduction I recently finished reading Gene Krantz’s book “Failure Is Not an Option” and was struck by its impact on my thinking and approach to leadership.

This story was generated by ChatGPT with the following prompt: Can you write a christmas story about two insurance companies.

tl;DR Shu Ha Ri’s concept can help teams approach Agile adoption in a structured and deliberate way and balance the need for consistency and flexibility as they learn and grow.

Yup, I have a highlighting system.

When I rejoined LV in 2108, LV was still an ITIL-heavy organisation.

Any engineer who has started a new project will know how time-consuming bootstrapping a new repo can be.

You’ve all heard that we’re currently going through a great resignation.

15 Visuals that will motivate you to read more books: 1.

If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html

“How does DevOps ideally interact with information security and compliance?”

WTF is SRE?

A detailed series of posts on testing microservice-based applications, covering environment/request isolation, staging environment issues and more.

Many of you will have seen my capability map and how they align to various goals (which I need to update for our new strategic priorities), but here’s a nice interactive version from Google: https://www.devops-research.com/research.html

After an evening of tinkering with pi-hole I woke up to the following warning in pi-hole.

Are you an overly cautious person who hates using their actual email address in case someone sells it to a marketing company?

Problem I want to export my kindle highlights, and I dont want to use third party software.

Introduction As a student, I was highly disorganised.

A good set of extensions can make working with a particular workspace or programming language more productive and you’d often like to share this list with your team or colleagues.

I’ve been working with Azure recently and was introduced to the Rover, a fully provisioned container for working with Azure Terraform.

As part of my second brain workflow, I like to store complete copies of the sources I read.

Problem I want to receive notifications when a download has started or completed.

I.

Here are the books I read last year.

When companies adopt Agile, the debate always ends up being one of Kanban or Scrum.

This title is very misleading because like everyone else I was stuck in my house for most of 2020.

Some might argue I don’t have one, let alone two.

If like myself you work in a corporate environment and you have policies which restrict you from downloading directly from the internet then you will need a proxy or mirror which can fetch the dependencies you need while keeping track of what you pull in.

I discovered a new trick with Terraform, which helps us better structure our infrastructure as code.

As a Principal DevOps Engineer, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for you to expect me to have built my home server/lab/NAS.

Problem I want to categorise my tests, but I also want to see their respective code coverage using Jacoco.

This is is the subject of many holy software wars.