Trying out something new
@raygunio.
I’ve paused core product development for two months (support continues).
I’m calling this time “Gardening”. A time for the engineering group to weed their own garden, and plant for the future.
This means we have two months of self direction. The ultimate goal is to significantly accelerate our development efforts.
We have a relatively large code base, across three major products, and it’s showing some age.
Over this two months we’ll be:
- upgrading everything to .NET 6 (in prep for 8 at end of the year). We’ve moved many things, but have stragglers we need to move.
- finally tackling some of the medium complexity “one day we’ll get to that” tasks across our system.
- Improving the DX around our CI/CD ( we use
@teamcity and
@OctopusDeploy but can be tidied and new approaches tested)
- Simplifying our FE code (mainly also dropping some legacy stuff that has been pending a move).
- long list of other smaller tasks the team are keen to get to.
We’ll see how much we achieve over the next two months.
I’m an engineer at heart. While we make continual improvements, we *all* know the “deal with that tomorrow” times compound. It’s a common challenge for software engineers.
I’m hoping that, as CEO, I’ll get some insights around how valuable this type of work is, and in particular, if allocating everyone for 2 months solid will “pay for itself” in accelerated delivery on the other side. My gut tells me this is a wise investment that more software businesses should make, but we’ll see!