At its core, software engineering is the set of things we have to do to turn ideas into running software, and that running software is of value. Meatspace to Metal is where we will talk about everything required to build engineering systems, teams, and organizations that do this well.
But why Meatspace to Metal? Meatspace captures the human dreaming/plotting/scheming end of the equation. All this has to start with one or more people who have ideas and set about making those ideas come to life. We are software engineers, and we care about building and running software. All software ultimately is electrons on metal, and yes, that includes you, cloud-native folks.
We live in a time where thanks to some excellent ongoing work , high-performing software teams and organizations are pretty well profiled. There is a broad understanding of which performance measures line up with things being delivered and managed well and staying on the right side of the value measure. What’s left chiefly as an exercise to the reader is how to build, or even harder transform, into a high-performing group delivering software.
The central question is then; How do you build and evolve a platform that delivers a high-performing engineering organization? There are many areas for us to dig into; infrastructure management, build release and delivery practice observability throughout your infrastructure, source structures and dependency management, and much more.
Along the way, we’ll put these topics into their broader context; business domains, stage of a company, industry practices, and a few other significant dimensions. In all cases, all we ever do as engineers is to make tradeoff decisions. We have opinions about what we think better (and yes, if we’re being honest, sometimes best) approaches are, but we hope to help you, dear reader, more effectively evaluate your state, your goals and then pick your path and journey.
We hope that you’ll enjoy us as we wander and ponder from Meatspace to Metal, and almost certainly, back again.