There are a lot of people with strong thoughts about brand and culture, and how the two relate to each other. From conversations I’ve had with others, I thought it high time to put my perspective down in writing.

I have a lot of time for this HBR article, “Brand is Culture, Culture is Brand“. It is absolutely correct to say that you cannot build a brand if your business culture does not / will not support and live that brand, and this is a fault seen so commonly. Business rebrand frequently; and it’s very common to see immediate push-back because the way the business operates doesn’t fly with the new brand at all.

However, I think things have to go deeper than this.

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So, after my previous slightly ranty post, I’ve been trying out a few different tools and approaches to building containers, attempting to find something which is closer to my idea of what good looks like. One tool stands out from the rest: Habitus.

Habitus provides just-enough-Make to bring some sanity to the Docker build process, with the following killer features:

1. ability to order container builds by expressing a dependency from one to another
2. first-class support for artefacts created during the container build process, which can be extracted and used as input for later builds
3. management API to provide build-time secrets into the containers

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I spent a few hours this weekend attempting to re-acquaint myself with the Docker system and best practices by diving in and updating a few applications I run. I wrote up an article no long after Docker’s release, saying that it looked pretty poor, and unfortunately things haven’t really changed – this doesn’t stop me using it, but it’s a shame that the ecosystem apparently has learnt nothing from those that came before.

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This is a quick and pithy review of Emily Webber’s free e-book, “The Agile Team Onion“. At about 20 pages of content, it’s a concise enough work itself – I personally appreciate the laser-like focus on a single subject; in this case, it’s thinking about the various factors that affect agile team make-up, sizing and interfacing with other people and teams.

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Project management is always guaranteed to bring out some strong opinions, and a recent Twitter discussion was no different – but, while the core discussion on Twitter was great, it really deserves a much longer-form treatment. Paul Johnston wrote up his thoughts about getting people to talk about predictions instead of deadlines – and much of it is hard to argue with, but I have a bit of a different perspective.

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