Steve Fenton

In this episode of Continuous Delivery Office Hours, Tony Kelly, Bob Walker, and Steve Fenton discuss the purpose and common pitfalls of software change approvals. They argue that strict, manual change approval processes are often just a reflex to pa...

Tony Kelly hosts our latest episode of Continuous Delivery Office Hours, with Bob Walker and Steve Fenton. While application code deployments have become highly automated and disciplined, database changes often remain manual, "folksy," and prone to ...

Tony Kelly hosts our latest episode of Continuous Delivery Office Hours, with Bob Walker and Steve Fenton. Your system's architecture can support team autonomy, independent deployability, and independent evolution of components, or it can be a stick...

Tony Kelly hosts our latest episode of Continuous Delivery Office Hours, with Bob Walker and Steve Fenton. Your branching strategy can support Continuous Delivery, or make it an impossible goal. Teams should assess the impact of how they branch on t...

Tony Kelly hosts our latest episode of Continuous Delivery Office Hours, with Bob Walker and Steve Fenton. In this episode of Continuous Delivery Office Hours, we ponder how you know whether your software is deployable so you can be confident you're...

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...

Tony Kelly hosts our first episode of Continuous Delivery Office Hours, with Bob Walker and Steve Fenton. In this episode of Continuous Delivery Office Hours, we ponder why prioritizing Continuous Delivery CD is essential for managing risk. We chall...

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...