I co-wrote an article titled Developing Your Career recently for the Auto Trader Engineering blog about how we help managers guide their staff towards the things they need to work on to further their personal development. The article discusses how we came up with a comprehensive set of behaviours and qualities that we expect to see developers exhibit as they move between different levels of responsibility. If you are a developer or a development manager then you might find it a useful resource to inform your discussions around personal development.

I have 2268 bookmarks (which is scary as I swear I used to have >5k) which I use to augment my brain as a personal searchable catalogue of information I’ve found useful and yet I regularly go digging through my ‘Sent Items’ to find links I’ve recommended in the past, to send to engineers after mentoring sessions. I also have a heap of stuff in my Twitter likes amongst all the cat pictures and memes, much of which I have forgotten is useful.

This is a tweaked version of a presentation I first did at Devops Edinburgh. Here are the slides for my talk, which covers

I presented about Automated Deployment at Auto Trader for a DevOps Edinburgh meet up on Monday 7th December at the Skyscanner offices in Edinburgh. Here are the slides for my talk, which covers

I’ve just made it back from DevOpsDays in Ghent, Belgium. This was my first DevOpsDays event, and the atmosphere was celebratory as it was the fifth anniversary of the first, and sadly Patrick Dubois’s last event as the main organiser as he is stepping down.

I presented about Continuous Delivery activities at Auto Trader at last night’s DevOps Manchester meet up on Tuesday 22nd October at Auto Trader’s new First St offices in Manchester, alongside Jim Davies who talked about Moneysupermarket’s copy/paste datacenter. Here are the slides.

We had the second DevOps Manchester meet up on Tuesday 29th May at the new TechHub Manchester office, where the topic was Monitoring. Along with an excellent talk from Steve Elliot of Late Rooms on ELK Wrestling (where ELK represents Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana), I presented Graphite and Friends. Here are the slides (and below are the links from the presentation since they aren’t clickable in the embedded version).

Static analysis has been a widely used tool in development teams for some time now. So when I saw this tweet about ShellCheck I was very interested. I’ve looked for some wisdom about shell scripting best practices in the past, and not found much useful. Plus, automating your coding standards being one of the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, perhaps a tool like this is much more valuable.

A number of times I’ve had to fix problems with shell scripts which have been edited or created on a Windows system and committed with Windows CRLF line endings, then checked out on to a UNIX system and executed. Perhaps you’ve seen this output somewhere?