Tech Radar - Techniques

Techniques

These are software engineering techniques on my radar at various levels. See the top-level Tech Radar for other categories.

Platform Engineering

• Status: Assess

At the time of writing, this is a fairly emergent term that has a few people excited although -- as it typically the case -- it's a term for a pattern that has been growing for some time.

See Building a Successful Platform and Platform Pitfalls and Myths for some more of my thoughts on platforms.

See What is Platform Engineering? for an introduction.

Data Mesh

• Status: Assess

An alternative to centralised data lakes -- i.e. what if we could distribute data across an organisation such that people locally own the parts that are relevant for them to own, but we can still do analysis and mining across it all.

Shape-up

• Status: Trial

This is probably best explained in the fully Shape-up book published by Basecamp. A reductive summary is that it's a process of working in larger "blocks" or sprints of time (e.g. 6 weeks) and choosing work for those sprints based on things you think are worth spending that time on. A key component of this is stopping if the time is exhausted to avoid the sunk cost fallacy.