Build Better Products, Faster on Alex Hudson

Apple’s Watch Series 12 launch yesterday has one headline feature that’s generating a lot more discussion than the usual battery/screen/chip incrementalism: Siri can now listen continuously, in the background, and produce recaps and transcriptions of conv…

Most teams already let production shape what they do next, but we still think in these relatively linear cycles from idea to production.

Everyone wants to go faster; this has always been true, and it is especially true in the context of LLM deployment.

I’ve been cooking with Mindful Chef for about two years.

I left Twitter not long after it rebranded to X.

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Everyone is talking about what AI can do right now, and the impact that it is likely to have on us.

You’ve likely heard the term “metaverse” many times over the past few years, and outside the realm of science fiction novels, it has tended to refer to some kind of computer-generated world.

Azure has never been the #1 cloud provider - that spot continues to belong to AWS, which is the category leader.

The UK NHSX “contact tracing” app is being deployed today, in one small place, to test whether or not this approach might help get us out of lockdown.

It’s all over the news, and this is Yet Another Hot Take.

I rarely blog about purely technical errors, but this specific message from yarn is something I’ve seen a number of people struggling with.

Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer.

A good friend recently wrote to me to ask what it takes to become a CTO in this day and age.

I regularly get asked by businesses - often start-ups - how to approach information security.

Jack Dorsey, famous for co-founding Twitter, is in the news currently as his Twitter account was hijacked.

About Me I’m a CTO with twenty years of management experience in e-commerce and software-as-a-service product development, spanning start-up to enterprise.

The Libra Association de-cloaked today.

For at least a couple of days, climate change has been back on the agenda with the protests happening in London by Extinction Rebellion.

Many of us deal with personal and sensitive data these days.

For those who aren’t from the UK, the “High Street” is what we call the shopping parade in a typical town or city.

No doubt many people will have read the story about how an error in a piece of software has prevented a number of women being invited to a standard screening.

My estimable Twitter-pal Paul Johnson has put together a very reasonable thread about his thinking on serverless costs (ie.

Steven Sinofsky of a16z (previously Microsoft) probably first coined the phrase, “Don’t ship the org chart”.

There are few options in the cloud that are really worth investing time in.

Everyone is now talking about the CPU security problems that are now being fully disclosed: they’re dubbed Meltdown and Spectre.

I just listened to “Troubleshooting Agile”, a new audio series from CTO Craft contributor Douglas Squirrel and his podcast partner Jeffrey Fredrick.

Sam Altman has published a thoughtful piece about what was previously called the Singularity, which he now refers to as The Merge.

Gosh, I wish I was at re:Invent.

This evening’s RedMonk article on linguistic prescriptivism is, as usual, excellent reading.

It has been just over a week since I wrote that software architecture is failing, which received a level of response I didn’t expect.

Everyone wants faster Continuous Integration (CI).

On social media right now, strong rumours are spreading that the WPA2 encryption scheme has been broken in a fundamental way.

I doubt there has ever been a time when software architecture was seen as a raging success.

RedMonk published a great article today on the incompleteness of technical debt as a metaphor.

Millions of words are expended on software architecture.

Last week I gave a lightning talk, ostensibly on Kubernetes / docker / prometheus, to a motley crew of London CTOs.

I wrote a couple of times previously about Symfony 4, particularly the architecture and use of Makefiles.

It’s interesting watching history repeat itself.

People sometimes ask me about the structure of our internal development team, and to what extent we’re truly “agile”.

Coming up with convincing vision and mission in a corporate environment is never easy – in fact, I think it’s one of the most difficult things you can do.

Explaining Serverless technology If you’re an IT or business leader, you’ve probably heard about serverless.

It was only just over a week ago that I posted about brand being the net result of action, and in the last few days United Airlines have decided to furnish me with the best example yet.

It’s always interesting reading how other people view strategy, and Vince Law’s WTF is Strategy?

Back in 2010 I wrote a post about Canonical’s business direction, in response to something Bradley Kuhn had posted.

The news about plans for Symfony 4 has got a number of my dev team a bit excited about the possibilities – although, so far, there is precious little information about the new tool, Flex, and exactly what “composition over inheritance” will mean in practi…

There’s a great blog post doing the rounds today, titled “Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse“.

There are a lot of people with strong thoughts about brand and culture, and how the two relate to each other.

So, after my previous slightly ranty post, I’ve been trying out a few different tools and approaches to building containers, attempting to find something which is closer to my idea of what good looks like.

I spent a few hours this weekend attempting to re-acquaint myself with the Docker system and best practices by diving in and updating a few applications I run.