Author: Kit Merker

Three Hard Facts

First, the complexity of your software systems is through the roof, and you have more external dependencies than ever before. 51% of IT professionals surveyed by SolarWinds in 2021 selected IT complexity as the top issue facing their organization.

Second, you must deliver faster than the competition, which is increasingly difficult as more open-source and reusable tools let small teams move extremely fast. Of the 950 IT professionals surveyed by RedHat, only 1% indicated that open-source software was “not at all important.”

In any data management policy, there are two extremes: save everything (just in case), and delete everything that ages out. The two extremes work hand in hand, as eventually, you decide that even if you want to save it all, the realities of storage costs have forced you to delete your data arbitrarily.

Ideally, you would retain "interesting” data that might be useful and delete the rest. Even better would be to not collect the data in the first place.

If we ask for a simple explanation of tech debt and the cause of it, generally, we hear something along the lines of: 

Tech debt is redoing or refactoring your team's work in a less-than-ideal way. 

Another year, another wave in how we build software. We now live in a post-software-eaten world, where software is like the water that fish aren’t even aware exists. And yet, we have struggled to pin down the mysterious aether that makes the best software systems delightful while the rest are clunky, decaying, hulking beasts struggling to stay afloat.

The latest trend is Platform Engineering, the idea that a team in your company should take care of the common shared services that other development teams rely on to build their products and services.