Building a DevX Maturity Matrix I promised in Part I of this article that I'd explain how I generate the headline numbers that I report as part of the KPIs or OKRs for the Developer eXperience of a product. The answer is rather simple but, at least initially, quite labourious. Reminder: what a maturity matrix is. A maturity matrix encodes a maturity level as a value (typically a positive integer) for every unique combination of product, feature, customer/developer type, and maturity type....
DevX is a Quality Process
DevX is not just about what we create For all the good that a Developer eXperience team can do, by creating documentation, improving APIs, building tools and libraries, and fostering community, this will only ever constitute part of the total developer experience. The foundation stones of a good developer experience are actually in the hands of the core product teams. Delivering a quality product, which does what it should, and does it reliably, is the bedrock on which any developer's eXperience is based....
Maturity Matrices: A tool for DevX KPIs and OKRs (Part 1)
Introduction This blog post will introduce the Maturity Matrix I have been developing to help report on the state of Developer eXperience for a given product. In this first part, I'll explain why I think it's needed, what I report from it, and what those reports mean. In Part II I'll explain how I produce these numbers. KPIs and OKRs for DevX are hard Knowing how to describe goals and measure performance against those goals is a challenge for every DevX team....
Why the long pause?
The history of my blog If you look back through my historic posts (many of which I’ve recently migrated here from my historic blog spot blog), you’ll notice that I’ve been blogging, on and off, since 2007. That’s actually not true - I had done some previous blogging on another platform (all now lost), and actually I’d written occasional thoughts on various “home pages” going all the way back to 1995....
Software Engineers Don't Scale
Software Engineers don’t scale … or how I learned to stop worrying and love commenting my code. NOTE: I originally published this on the Inside Heetch blog This article, by Mathew Skelton and Manuel Pais, reminds me that, for everything that’s been made simpler in this era of cloud computing and micro-services, we’ve paid a price in terms of cognitive load. We simply need to keep more context in mind when making or evaluating any change to our code....
System Updates With Mixin
If you use ClearLinux’s mixin to add custom bundles to your installation, you will still be able to update your upstream bundles, however it will nolonger be as simple as doing a sudo swupd update. Here are the step’s you need to go through, assuming you defined your mixin repository in ~/mixin-repo: cd ~/mixin-repo createrepo_c . sudo mixin build sudo swupd update --migrate … this is at least the process I have used, and which worked for me....
Developer Care
Those of you who know me may be aware that at the end of August 2018, I left my job at Avocet to join a new team at Heetch. The main allure of the role at Heetch was the chance to be part of a team deliberately set up to act as a catalyst for product developers. The concept under which we work is known as “Developer Care”, and back in November I wrote a fairly extensive blog post for Heetch about what that means and how it came to be....
Enabling H.264 playback in Firefox on Intel's Clearlinux
In common with most Linux distros, Intel’s ClearLinux doesn’t ship H.264 decoding by default. Given the novel nature of ClearLinux there isn’t a nice off the shelf solution to this yet, so we have to use a workaround. I’ll try and find a better way to achieve this, but for now this will get H.264 video working in YouTube / Twitter etc, for now: wget http://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2 tar xf ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.tz2 cd ffmpeg-snapshot ....
Convert OpenOffice.org Calc FODS XML to something meaningful
Get the code: The code in this blog post is now available at: http://github.com/tealeg/FODS2XML Background For a while now I’ve been receiving data in Excel files that needed to be integrated into some better structured XML data. Originally I was using a little xls2csv from the catdoc package in Arch Linux to pull the data from the horrible bloated XLS files into something usable. The trouble is the conversion to CSV was a little error prone and it’s really hard to see such errors in a 40MB CSV file....
Project Greyhound: My Granddad's camera
How this began A year or so ago, whilst I was visiting England on a business trip I took the time to go down and visit my parents. During this visit my dad indulged my interest in old cameras by digging out a few of his own old cameras and a couple of his fathers. The oldest two in this group were a Kodak Number 2 Brownie, in very good order, and an extremely battered looking Ensign Greyhound folding camera....