Last week I had the pleasure of talking at JavaZone. I told the story of how we gained some awesome insights in production by using the OpenTelemetry agents.
A recording below, but it is in Norwegian. Sorry. π
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My talk on KTor and HTMX at KotlinConf 2025
In May I had the honour of talking about KTor and HTMX at KotlinConf in Copenhagen. It was based on my previous articles on how to do SSE updates and KTor.
It was my first time speaking outside Norway, and I had great fun. The conference was really well run, and I met a lot of great people from all over Europe.
Highly recommended, and not just mobile development. About half the conference were back-end oriented too.
Here is a recording of my talk: https://youtu.be/AlGWsTXnWsY?si=DENv97CB_B4B6540
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A Continuous Delivery reading list
Over time I have worked a lot with continuous delivery and tried to explain why it is such an important concept. When I was asked for a reading list, I was left without a clear answer. So this is an attempt at creating one. π
I have some writing that I might do around these concepts, but this list is it for now. Check back later, I will update this when I have something. π Let me know if you have any feedback or questions.
The list
Types: π = Book, π = Website, π = Report, π = Blog, π¬ = Video, π§ = Podcast
- Why:
- π The latest DORA accelerate report always has some interesting insights. 2024 especially had some insights around AI.
- π Accelerate; the original DORA book. Explaining everything in depth
- π The original book from Jez Humble and Dave Farley: Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
- π¬ In Continuous Delivery Simply Explained, Dave Farley takes us through the basics as well as why it matters.
- π Team Topologies helps us understand how different teams can interface and align to create flow and great software.
- π Dave Farley has written a lot of good stuff. He has shared excellent insights especially in Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster.
- π SPACE and DORA
- π Slow deployments causes meetings by Kent Beck π
- Techniques:
- π All about pull requests and the dysfunctions that accompany them.
- π And if you decide to move away from pull requests you should probably be going From Async Code Reviews to Co-Creation Patterns an article from Dragan StepanoviΔ.
- π To manage risk when going into production often you should to use feature toggles by Pete Hodgson on Martin Fowlers website.
- π Refactoring to change your system in a controlled manner is essential. Kent Beck and Martin Fowler wrote the original and Michael C. Feathers followed up on how to work in a legacy codebase.
- π Automated testing is essential, and I would argue you get a lot further with TDD. Regardless of whether you do test first or after, you can learn a lot from Kent Becks’ Test Driven Development: By Example.
- π When you deliver multiple times a day you can’t have bugs occurring all the time. In Bugs Optional? Kent Beck describes the effect continuous delivery can have on bugs. It also describes how building a culture for delivering requires few bugs.
- π Real Options: Making small changes to production all the time supercharges your learning process. I have always appreciated how it pushes us to keep options open for later. Chris Matts and Olav Maassen has written about real options.
- π I think Observability is usually the least explored part of Continuous Delivery but also essential when speed increases. If you want to explore you can read about π the three pillars of observability and how you should focus on results by moving π Beyond the 3 Pillars of Observability.
- If you would like to dig even deeper into observability have a look at π read Honeycombs’ Observability book. Thanks to Erlend Wiig for pointing it out to me.
- And I really like the defaults in π New Relic APM (with an agent). I recommend testing that to see how easy it can be to get deep insights into your application.
- Some general resources that I generally appreciate for this:
- Dave Farley has some good π¬ videos and interviews on Youtube as well as a podcast series. π§ This podcast episode comes highly recommended.
- π Kent Beck has always been a great inspiration and he writes a lot on Substack. Well worth the read even though it is less about continuous delivery explicitly.
- π Martin Fowler is another one of the great ones. His website contains a lot of articles about software development, and here is his tag about continuous delivery.
- π eXtreme Programming is considered by many to the be essence of agile and continuous delivery.
There’s of course a lot of related topics that I take for granted. Things like DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, Build Pipelines and Continuous Integration are essential but not mentioned. You can easily find a lot about them online.
Let me know if I should include anything else. I would love to learn something new as well. π
Thanks to Terje Heen and Asgaut MjΓΈlne for contributing with input and content. Also a bit of AI. π Gemini and Claude are my favourites.