Or, why AI systems fail in surprisingly familiar ways. With the introduction of AI-assisted coding tools and agents, many people were hoping we’d solve all the problems of human teams. Without the people, politics, and personalities software deliver...

When you join Octopus, you get a great laptop and your choice from a range of docks, monitors, webcams, and input devices. You also get a home office allowance, which lets you upgrade your space and get 50% back. You may want a sit/stand desk, an awe...

You don't notice your GitHub Actions versions until you start getting warnings about things like "Node 20 is no longer supported". When you think about it, GitHub Actions are yet another dependency that needs to be kept up to date and present supply ...

Vibe coding offered us a tantalizing dream. Have a conversation with AI, forget the code exists, and ship software. This can be a useful way to solve localized and one-off problems. For production systems that need to live, breathe, and evolve for ye...

When you can't deploy on demand, you've lost control of your software. Risk accumulates in unreleased code, and the more changes you store in one place, the more chance they have of triggering overheads, rework, and failures. When you have blockers s...

The flow rate of change means we don’t have all the answers! There’s a growing body of research around AI coding assistants with a confusing range of conflicting results. This is to be expected when the landscape is constantly shifting from coding s...

Continuous Delivery promotes low-risk releases, faster time-to-market, higher quality, lower costs, better products, and happier teams. Software is at the core of everything a business does today, so organizations must be able to respond to customer ...

If you've ever worked on a collection of different Node apps, you've likely encountered version conflicts. Everyone wants a different version of Node or PNPM, and your new job is trying to align them all, or managing versions daily. That's when open...

You're looking at a list of things you'd love to do, and you're looking at AI coding tools as a way to boost your way down that list. You might not have the relationships mapped out, but you can see there is some route to value if you spend on LLMs t...

So, stuff happened and npm has been updated to reduce the volume of stuff happening. In a world of SBOMs, SLSA, and supply chain attacks, it's time to get serious about publishing packages. In this case, that means using the new Trusted Publisher fea...

A classic route into programming is a childhood encounter with a computer. You realize it's your passion, so you go and study computer science and head off to build the next amazing software product. That's not how it happened for me. Instead, it cam...

My first encounter with DevOps was so simple that I didn’t even realize its power. Let me share the story so you can see how it went from accidental discovery to deliberate practice, and why it was such a dramatic pivot. The backdrop to this pivotal...

In his 1956 account of the SAGE program, Herbert Benington highlighted the opportunity to use computers to reduce the cost of programming, documentation, and testing. The creation of utilities, compilers, and instrumentation accounted for about half...

The term “snake oil salesman” is often used to describe individuals who engage in deceptive marketing practices. Wild west characters like Clark Stanleyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClarkStanley advertised their snake oil as a wondrous cure-all remed...

Why maintaining a healthy skepticism gets you better outcomes. One of my old hobbies was writing for independent music magazines, such as Spill Magazine distributed free at music venues and DV8 distributed free at hair salons. Over the years, I saw ...

When organizations introduce AI, they often make a critical error: they create entirely new metrics to measure its impact. This approach misses the fundamental truth that AI is a tool to help achieve existing goals, not a reason to change what succes...

I zipped up to London to share the Platform Engineering Pulse reporthttps://octopus.com/publications/platform-engineering-pulse with the amazing London DevOpshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/londondevops/ group. Afterwards, we spent several hours tal...

You have probably faced the same dilemma. If you let you dependencies get out of date, the chances are you'll harbor a code vulnerability. If you update them too soon, you potentially introduce a malicious version with a supply chain attack. This ma...

You want to paint a wall. The fastest way to start is to open the paint tin and start rolling out the color. Except that’s not the quickest way to paint a wall, as expert painters know. If you give a professional this job, they won’t touch the paint ...

We all read the daily announcements about another major company launching a sweeping transformation. We’ve had waves of Agile, digital, omni-channel and cloud-native transformations, and the AI-first transformations are a hazy silhouette on the horiz...