Test-driven development (TDD) is a core IBM Garage practice. It provides the foundation for the other practices such as continuous delivery, DevOps, and automation. When you work in a test-driven style, before writing any code you have to figure out what success looks like for the change you are making…

Last night I dreamt that Roger Daltry’s wife told me to write about fashion and programming. We were in a small skate-punk shop. It was never made clear how she knew me or why she cared. By the end of the dream I’d almost written a “why fashion and programming…

The past year saw an unprecedented flourishing of “photos of home offices,” “recommendation threads for microphones,” and “microphone review videos with huge numbers of views.” I’ve experimented with a few different setups for talks, and I’ve been having to watch my own videos more than I usually do.

What are the climate impacts of our technology habits? Part I of this blog discusses the importance of multi-tenancy, utilisation, and elasticity. So what happens if we establish good multi-tenancy patterns, create highly elastic pods and clusters, and keep our utilisation high? Is this a guaranteed climate win? It all…

Earlier this year, I had the enormous honour of delivering a keynote at KubeCon Europe. I wanted to start a conversation about how our community should be thinking about climate change and what actions we should be taking. The starting point is … we have a problem. The earth is…

The world is changing. The cloud gives us dazzling computational possibilities, and … potentially uses a lot of energy. As climate change accelerates, where do we, as engineers, fit in? Are we part of the problem or part of the solution? How do we balance the needs of people against…

I’ve recently started using Tekton as my main build system. In combination with Argo CD for GitOps management of the pipeline scripts, it has some pretty nice features. One of the things I’m appreciating is the ability to get down to the platform level and customize my pipeline. A challenge…

The IBM Garage is a highly dynamic, multi-disciplinary consulting practice working with clients and partners of any size across all industries. We combine design thinking, lean startup, devops, extreme programming, and cloud native development into an awesome package of client success and staff satisfaction. Our clients include both startups and…

Poor old garbage collection. One of the unsung heroes of Java, often blamed, rarely praised. Before Java made garbage collection mainstream, programmers had little choice but to track all the memory they’d allocated manually, and deallocate it once nothing was using it anymore. This is hard. …