Craig Pardey

Thurs Mar 26 2026 was a significant milestone on my quest to liberate my team from the tyranny of my client’s enterprise deployment pipeline: we successfully deployed a service to production using my Shadow Pipeline (see my previous posts: here and here).

My client is looking to hire senior backend developers with good written and verbal communication skills that can be in the office 2-3 days per week.

TL;DR My client is paying top dollar for enterprise licenses for a platform that their own policies prevent people from using.

In my recent post about CI/CD performance, I mentioned that I’d built a shadow pipeline in Ansible to deploy to our on-prem dev environment.

My current client has an enterprise CI/CD pipeline that is maintained by a centralized team that does not use it.

Payments Canada published an opinion piece outlining how they think ISO fits into the payments ecosystem.

ISO 20022 defines a catalog of messages to standardize data exchange in the finance industry, and it is gaining popularity in Payments.

I wrote about DRY configs many years ago but astonishingly my clients don’t seem to read my blog.

I recently had to return an item that I’d bought online.

Only by increasing flow through the constraint can overall throughput be increased – Eliyahu M.

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything – Dwight D.

If your sign needs a sign explaining the sign then it’s a poorly-designed sign.

Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) are used extensively in enterprise software to define things like performance requirements and availability expectations but it’s important to be specific about what we’re asking for.

I’m currently working with a large retail banking client to help them modernize their payments infrastructure.

A moral hazard is when an..

QA organisations have come a long way in the last decade or two.

What is it like to work at your company?

I’m working for a client that has separate teams for architecture and engineering.

Before COVID-19 and ubiquitous work-from-home, we used to have meetings in a room where people would sit around and discuss the matter at hand.

The backend-for-frontend (BFF) pattern is when a backend API is designed specifically for the needs of a frontend consumer.

Consider the following statement: Our consultancy operates on a 50% margin.

Documentation is one of the most valuable artifacts of any technology project or platform.

New technologies generate a lot of noise as they work their way through the hype cycle and it’s hard for newcomers to figure out what they should learn.

One thing that development teams constantly struggle with is striking a balance between building features, fixing bugs, paying down tech debt, and embarking on more ambitious activities like replacing core components in their architecture.

Software should do one thing, and do it well.

I’ve been working on re-platforming the online banking system for a Canadian retail bank for over two years.

Remember the Great Equifax Hack back in Sept 2017?

A trucker delivering palletized cargo to a pier would have to remove each item from the pallet and place it on the dock.

I’m currently reading The Box by Marc Levinson.

When I first heard about the so-called UK Challenger Banks like Monzo and Atom, I was amazed that there wasn’t a similar offering in Canada.

Michael Feathers says that legacy code is any code without tests but I’d go a step further and say that legacy code is any code that is still running even though the original developer(s) are no longer working on it.

The Pragmatic Programmer is one of the most influential books that I have read as a software developer.

Your email address identifies you in this online world.

This is a continuation of my post about clean tea, except this time I analysed the offerings from Tealyra.

I recently had an unexpectedly great support experience from a company that one does not usually associate with excellent customer support: Microsoft.

This is a continuation of my post about clean tea, except this time I analysed the offerings from Teavana® (a Starbucks company).

I recently weaned myself off coffee.

This is a quick cheat sheet taken from a great little book called “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” by Al Ries & Jack Trout.

Configuring Hubot to work with a self-hosted HipChat server took a bit of tweaking, so here’s a quickstart guide based on what I discovered along the way.

Me: Why is this report different to the one in production?

There’s nothing that beats the feeling of being part of an exceptional team and yet it is strangely difficult to define exactly what makes one team great and another team not-so-great.

I’ve been pushing large enterprises to adopt agile development practices for years so I was very excited when I began seeing many of them embarking upon ambitious Agile Transformation projects where they attempt to not only change the way they build softw…

Agile has gained a lot of traction in large enterprises in recent years but I’m concerned about the specifics of how teams are implementing it.

I have used automated build tools on all my projects since 2000.

Externalizing application configuration values into a properties file is a common pattern in enterprise applications, because it gets the environment-specific settings out of the code and avoids the need for environment-specific builds.

The question of location comes up a lot in software consulting.

A thread appeared on Hacker News recently about how successful people operate.

I’ve been using DVCSs for more than four years and I love them.

I came across an interesting problem recently in some JDBC code that was inserting rows into a Netezza database.

A bi-temporal data model is a fancy way of saying that all tables have 2 pairs of dates: business from/to, and audit from/to.