PH.DO

Paul Hammant DevOps

Contacting me by email is best to talk about any work I can do for your company: paul@hammant.org

I visit your enterprise software team, to help you change your branching model to Trunk-Based Development (TBD). I come to an understanding of how you develop and deploy software, with lots of questions to stakeholders and leaders, and then come up with a plan that gets you to your goals. Other than Trunk-Based Development, areas for questions, recommendation (and training) often stray into:

  • Branch by Abstraction (I was the pioneer), and Feature Flags/Toggles (goes hand in hand)
  • A second pivot to a Monorepo design and optionally a directed graph build system like Buck or Bazel
  • Regular DevOps aspects around how to engineer Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and scaled Continuous Integration infra
  • Agile enablement factors, including the flow of stories from backlog into development
  • Good Behavior Driven Development (BDD) phrasing for work - for the least amount of defects during development
  • Speedy test automation, featuring the correct testing technologies and Service Virtualization
  • economic benefits for the proposed changes
  • case studies that show the way, both industry ones and those I was pivotal for, myself

I have performed many assessments over the years. The beginning of those was via ThoughtWorks (a well known consultancy), twelve years ago, bore the title Agile assessments. Later ThoughtWorks would sell Continuous Delivery (CD) assessments as the techniques emerged and Jez Humble and Dave Farley’s CD book came out (that uses some of my diagrams). Most recently, ThoughtWorks sold DevOps assessments, extending the pieces that came before. Many of those were as a ‘Principal Consultant’, but more recently some have been as a solo operator.

I have presented findings to CEOs, CIOs and executive teams. I have seen clients say ‘yes’ to everything I have recommended, and implement them. I have also seen clients struggle to implement changes as their commitments, constraints and old habits put pressure on them to maintain the status quo. I have crafted my practice and honed my approach after tens of these assessments rather than break through to a higher-throughput place. Many times I have done follow-up visits to help measure progress towards goals for clients that want to run the execution of the plan on their own.

🔗Case studies

I have brief case studies for:

  • A foreign exchange (FX) trading bank - where I personally described Branch by Abstraction to the client, and oversaw its implementation for two non-functional abstractions concurrently.
  • An airline - where I personally described Branch by Abstraction to the client, did the setup, and was tech-lead for one of the many concurrent functional abstractions myself.
  • A fin-tech startup - were already doing TBD before I arrived (as Snr. Dir. of Engineering), but I made a few small tweaks and introduced Branch by Abstraction

🔗Otherwise credentialing myself

The United Kingdom is my base, but I travel to clients and work remotely where needed.

Contacting me by email is best to talk about any work I can do for your company: paul@hammant.org.