Hello!

Welcome to my site where I post my thoughts, my ideas and my general ramblings. I care about helping people and organisations get the most of technology. I am mostly interested in leading and growing engineering teams, aligning engineers with purpose and values and wardley mapping. I hope you find some of it useful. Please feel free to reach out to me at details below or check out the contacts page for other places I linger.

Map those skills part 2 - using the maps

Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the use of wardley mapping to map my skills for career development. I think it’s important to think strategically about your career development, whether you’re early in your career looking to land that dream job or later and looking to transition into a role or company that reignites your passions. In my last post I talked about my journey developing my first skills maps and some of the mistakes I made along the way....

May 6, 2023 · 5 min · liamjbennett

Map those Skills!

Over the past few months the tech industry has been going through the shock and awe of corporate downsizing that occurs when the economy feels like its about to enter a recession. Big Tech is making layoff after layoff, typically around 10% of the workforce and those are the ones we know about. Many tech companies (and others) will start following suit, even if not as publicly, as the market shrinks and spending slows with companies trying to save cash and preserve profits....

February 17, 2023 · 8 min · liamjbennett

My workflow in 2023

In Aug 2021 I wrote my original post describing my knowledge management and productivity workflow, including the various tools I’d stitched together and some of the challenges I was having. Over a year on and I’ve been making some more significant changes to that tooling and as 2022 comes to a close I thought I would look back on that original post and reflect on what I’ve changed, fixed and learnt along the way....

December 23, 2022 · 7 min · liamjbennett

Chaos Engineering - fact or fiction

Intro (what even is it?!) I have been a developer and a DevOps engineer (or whatever the latest title is now) for most of my career and I like my systems to be reliable and well architected. I like being confident that when the unexpected happens, and it always does, that the systems that I am responsible for can handle it and not wake me up at 2am. When I talk to developers, I’m often talking about testing and the testing pyramid - we all know it’s value and the positive investment that it is....

November 16, 2022 · 6 min · liamjbennett

Mixed Operating Models - part 3

In the first two parts of this series, I talked about the problem space of mixed operating models in an organisation, why it exists and how to prepare for it. In this post I want to talk about the most important and often most challenging element of operating mixed operating models within an organisation: the cultural change. Any transition of working practices requires a corresponding and iterative process of empathetic change management, where with every modification and iteration, context is given for the changes, conversations are had with those who might be effected and (unlike many corporate change management initiatives) the process includes the input of those on the front-line of the changes....

August 22, 2022 · 7 min · liamjbennett

Mixed Operating Models - part 2

In the first post on Mixed Operating Models I discussed that each application in your landscape, both custom built and third-party will need a different type of operating model and using wardley mapping to map that landscape will give the context of which model is appropriate and at what time. Transitioning between models won’t be easy and requires both technical and cultural changes to be successful. In this post, I will talk about the technical aspects that act as a foundation to any operating model change and cultural shift....

July 13, 2022 · 8 min · liamjbennett

Mixed Operating Models - part 1

This month I wanted to start discussing a topic that has been going around and around in circles of conversation and thoughts for several years now - mixed operating models in IT organisations. There is a lot of ground to cover so stick with me over the next couple of posts and I’ll show you how and why this comes about and what we can do about it. The Problem One of the most challenging aspects of operating IT systems in large enterprise organisations is that there is a complex web of applications, data and infrastructure of varying ages and levels of support....

March 28, 2022 · 9 min · liamjbennett

My experiences building teams

I started writing again in order to get some of those 1:1 conversations and email threads out into the public where some of the conversations, learning and titbits of information can be useful to others. On that same theme I wanted to write down some of those learnings I’ve had building teams over the past 5 years. Grow mentors, coaches and champions This is something I’ve had learn as my teams have grown....

February 16, 2022 · 8 min · liamjbennett

6 things I learnt migrating to the cloud

I’ve had the opportunity over the past 5 years to be involved in many many different cloud migrations of all shapes, sizes and industries. From large-scale lift and shifts, native refactoring and even one or two cloud-to-cloud migrations. There are couple of things I have learnt along the way that appear to remain true irrespective or size, scope or type of organisation. 1. The cloud provider you choose isn’t the best technical fit but the best cultural fit There used to be a trend when organistations were moving to the cloud to ask the question: which cloud provider do we go with?...

January 14, 2022 · 11 min · liamjbennett

Lessons learnt being remote

I suppose that many of you reading this are doing so because the theme of remote working is top of mind and like myself over the past year you’ve found yourself in a deep hole of blog posts and podcasts trying to give you all tips on how to work remotely, how to manage a team remotely and how to do so without burning yourself out and becoming a titrant....

November 10, 2021 · 7 min · liamjbennett