About
Alan is an experienced and effective proponent of the craft of software development…
Activity
273 followers
-
Alan Griffiths reposted thisAlan Griffiths reposted thisSomething curious is happening in the "A.I." coding assistant gold rush. I'm seeing developers discovering they get better results using LLMs when they: * Prompt using test cases or examples * Work in small steps * Test continuously * Review code and refactor continuously * Commit after every small step when the tests pass * Sync with the trunk branch often At the same time, I'm seeing founders making claims of 5 developers doing the work of 50 using "A.I." (U-huh. And they could read The Mythical Man-Month in 5 hours instead of 50 if they bought 10 copies.) And it occurs to me that perhaps what's actually happening is they're discovering eXtreme Programming and attributing the benefits to chatbots, when it's actually fundamental changes to their workflow that's doing the heavy lifting. Given that there's no credible evidence that LLMs significantly improve team performance, but plenty of evidence that practices like continuous testing do, which is the more likely explanation? Think "This diet works best when you jog to the butchers instead of taking the car." ___________________________________________________ Would you believe it? It just so happens that I train and mentor teams in practices like Test-Driven Development and Specification By Example, continuous testing, refactoring and continuous integration. A happy coincidence!
-
Alan Griffiths shared thisThe first of my joint talk from the Ubuntu Summit 2024 is now online: https://lnkd.in/d62RYQZt
-
Alan Griffiths shared this" Remote work, doesn’t work" absolute clickbait? I've been working for a "remote first" organisation for over a decade. Admittedly, for me, there was some communication failure in the lead up to joining that cost a day or two. But, according to more recent joiners, this has been addressed long since. It has been one of the easiest places to be effective in that I've experienced. I've also suffered on site at organisations just as ineffective as John describes, this has nothing to do with remote or on site and has everything to do with the culture.Alan Griffiths shared thisRemote work, doesn’t work. It’s ineffective and hugely wasteful. For seven months I worked for a large enterprise company and it’s been the most frustrating role of my career. Let’s start from the beginning. In July 2023 I accepted a fully remote role with the company. My start date was set for early August. Things started to look bad just over a week before my start date. It was suddenly pushed back because they weren’t ‘ready’. Then as the start date got closer, just days away I’d still had no comms. No news of when a laptop would arrive or who to contact or what to do on day one . Day one was me tracking my new boss down to arrange a meeting to chase my onboarding. It didn’t give me a great impression of my boss. Even worse when he had no plan. I’m a grown up though. I’ve been through onboarding at many organisations so I cracked on as best I could. Which didn’t go well. The organisation was extremely bureaucratic and some people clearly had learned to use that to their advantage - looking busy, but doing the absolute minimum. This seemed to be particularly amplified by being remote. Previously in bureaucratic organisations I’d solve this problem by walking around the office and speaking to people. Then if needs be, talk to their boss/approver and figure out how to get things done. Remotely, with people spread across many timezones that just wasn’t possible. It’s too easy to be anonymous and hide behind Slack when that’s all there is. The net result, access to the very basic systems took a month, and many things I still didn’t have when I left six months later. The many sagas of this role bring me to the conclusion that remote work doesn’t work if you don’t have the right people and processes. And things haven’t improved in the month since I’ve left, I’m still trying to return their hardware to them.
-
Alan Griffiths shared thisAn old article comes back to haunt me?! It seems like a long time since I wrote this: but only four years! The world has changed a lot in that time, but this overview of app confinement is still valid.Alan Griffiths shared thisA Secure Environment for Running Apps? By Alan Griffiths Getting apps from the app store is easy. Alan Griffiths considers this from a security perspective. https://buff.ly/3Nkk8vk #ACCU #SoftwareEngineering #Throwback #Programming
-
Alan Griffiths shared thisMy talk from the Ubuntu Summit 2023 is now online. There's also a blog update covering much of the same material. https://lnkd.in/eQcWWC8i https://lnkd.in/e23gzVXq
-
Alan Griffiths shared thisThe premise of the question is flawed. Most open source contributions come from companies and organisations not individual hobbyists. And it is not "for free" as all contributors do so because they get value from doing so. That might be because it it makes the software effective for their business, or because it "scratches an itch".Alan Griffiths shared this“Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?” — Bill Gates, 1976 An interesting question to consider with respect to FREE Open Source Software, what do you think?
-
-
Alan Griffiths shared thisAlan Griffiths shared thisIntegrating applications that have a graphic interface in embedded systems used to be a challenge. With Ubuntu Frame, building IoT devices, kiosks and digital signage solutions has never been easier. Join Canonical’s Michał Sawicz, Mir Engineering Manager, and Gabriel Aguiar Noury, Product Manager on the 7th of June to discover the 6 steps to build your digital signage solution. #Ubuntu #IoT #DigitalSignage
-
Alan Griffiths shared thisWhat does it mean to be a senior member of a team? IMO means a responsibility and ability to ensure effective practices are adopted and followed by the team. There's a certain cognitive dissonance in reading this story. What John calls "the senior" acts in a way I wouldn't expect from a "senior", while the one he calls "the junior" adopts a more mature and effective approach.Alan Griffiths shared thisLast week I witnessed a great example of the importance of soft skills as a software engineer. Two engineers were blocked on their work, one junior and one senior. The senior asked for some help from another team. An engineer on the other team reached out and offered to help and spent a couple of hours helping out. The engineer who was helping out identified that the issue might be being caused by a third party and suggested the senior reach out to them for help. In the meantime if they shared their code he’d try debugging it further. He heard nothing back. In the meantime a junior engineer reached out for help, set up a call and started pairing on the issue. The engineer and junior worked together for a few hours and found a solution to the junior engineer’s challenge. The junior engineer thanked him privately and again later in public, acknowledging the help he’d received. Meanwhile the senior engineer raised a vey public and formal complaint about the team he had asked for help’s system. This naturally put the engineer who’d helped him on the defensive (and probably the whole team) - pointing out they was helping until the senior engineer stopped trying to find a solution. Putting someone on the defensive can make them feel attacked or criticised, causing them to become guarded and less willing to collaborate or communicate effectively. This can lead to a breakdown in relationships and eventually leads to the kind of politics we all hate in the workplace. The junior on the other hand has built a good relationship that will probably lead to good future collaboration. Remember, soft skills, such as effective communication and gratitude, are just as important as technical skills for software engineers. Building ant significant bit of software is a team activity. If this pattern continues, I see the junior progressing well in his career and the senior struggling to progress. #leadership #juniordeveloper #softskills #softwareengineering
Alan Griffiths commented on a post
1mo
If this were a bad idea, then why does every other password entry I see have feedback?
-
Alan Griffiths liked thisSafe String Parsing in Modern C++ I work on some open-source projects in my free time and I noticed a lot of unhandled "std::stoi" calls in DB layer. To avoid scattering try-catch blocks everywhere and prevent runtime crashes. In C++, conversion functions like "std::stoi" throw exception on failure. Chooseable C++23 features like "std::expected" instead of "std::optional" but i'm using C++20. An example for noexcept wrapper based on std::from_chars. Demo(godbolt): https://lnkd.in/d6HFEdWK
-
Alan Griffiths liked thisAlan Griffiths liked thisI’ve seen Metallica, Megadeth, and Tool live, but until last night’s NYC++ Meetup, I hadn’t seen Bjarne Stroustrup, the father of C++. He wasn’t just playing the classics; C++ is alive and evolving, and he articulated how the new and upcoming features are able to help realize and refine the vision he has had since the beginning. Programming languages let us express our engineering ideas, including our compassion for ourselves and our colleagues. I found myself mostly agreeing with Stroustrup but also feeling his numeric-conversion examples, while much improved from raw C++, still had more implicit conversion (albeit checked!) than I would prefer. Fortunately C++ gives us the flexibility to choose exactly how our types behave, and different solutions are appropriate for different situations. Two choice quotes: 1. On the tragedy that -1 < 2u is false: “-1 should be less than 2u. But it isn’t. Dennis [Ritchie] had a bad day.” 2. On Concepts being functions—and that while you can write them in terms of the raw language, most of us write them in terms of other Concepts, just as production functions are written in terms of other functions: “Beginners write all their code in the basic language.” I’ve thought this for years but had never heard it stated so cleanly. Thanks for a thought-provoking talk, and thanks to Daniel Katz and others for organizing and Deutsche Bank for hosting. As Tool put it, “cold silence has a tendency to atrophy any sense of compassion”, so reach out! And if you care about good C++, my team at NVIDIA, TensorRT, is hiring!
-
Alan Griffiths liked thisAlan Griffiths liked thisI often see C++ described as a "descendant of C." That's of course true, but it forgets a most important fact: C++ is a descendant of C *and* Simula. From C, it inherits the ability to manipulate hardware. From Simula, it inherits the ability to define user-defined types and build hierarchies of them them (OOP) and also the ideal of static type safety. To unify the two styles ("Paradims") it has to support Generic Programming. See https://lnkd.in/ebJSzxGF "Concept-based Generic Programming". October 2025. and https://lnkd.in/e3NP4Bjn "21st Century C++". February 2025.
-
Alan Griffiths liked thisAlan Griffiths liked thisIt’s almost 2026… and many of us still write C++98-style code So let’s fix that. Here are 5 examples of C++98 → Modern C++ that instantly make your code cleaner and more expressive. Modern C++ isn’t about fancy features — it’s safer, clearer, and looks like it belongs in 2026. 💬 Comment your favorite Modern C++ upgrade below! I’ll include the best ones in the next part. #ModernCpp #Cpp #Cpp20 #Cpp23 #CleanCode #Developers #XploreCpp #Programming #SoftwareEngineering
-
Alan Griffiths reacted on thisAlan Griffiths reacted on thisAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! once again!! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!! #TechHumor #SoftwareEngineering
-
Alan Griffiths liked thisAlan Griffiths liked thisI've been watching developers learn TDD for 25 years, and I have a reasonable ballpark on what it takes. Roughly 1,000 red-green-refactor-commit cycles for the "rules" to become habits, and to scale the learning curve enough to make TDD work in practice on everyday code bases. If you progress from regular practice (e.g., 2 hours a week) to TDD-ing on most of your code (10-15 hours a week, apparently), you're looking at 4-6 months. And that, folks, is why "We tried TDD and it didn't work"
Experience & Education
-
Canonical Ltd.
View Alan’s full experience
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
Courses
-
Mathematics
-
Projects
Recommendations received
10 people have recommended Alan
Join now to viewOther similar profiles
Explore more posts
Explore collaborative articles
We’re unlocking community knowledge in a new way. Experts add insights directly into each article, started with the help of AI.
Explore More