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Author Archives: Steven Thomas
AI Isn’t Magic — It’s a Stack
Artificial Intelligence. Two words that trigger everything from excited coffee chats with my mates to boardroom FOMO to outright apocalyptic fear. AI has dominated every conversation I’ve had for the last six months. Everyone wants a slice of it. It shows up in product roadmaps, vendor decks, job specs, and shareholder updates. But when I scratched beneath the surface, I found a messy pile of buzzwords and vague ambition.
I don’t know about you, but I like simple. So here is my attempt to make AI simple.
If you’re leading digital delivery, managing platforms, or just trying to figure out what AI means for your portfolio, this is your practical intro. There are buzzwords, but I explain them. There is no hype because I don’t have to impress anybody. It is just a clear look at how AI is structured, what matters now, and what’s coming.
Bold Predictions or Hype? Tech CEOs on AI’s Impact on Software Development
I’ve never seen a hype cycle like this one. Huge sound bites about AI — specifically, generative AI. Depending on who you ask, AI is either a helpful copilot or it’s gunning for your entire dev team’s jobs. As usual the truth is probably somewhere in between. But with so many CEOs talking up how much code AI is generating, it’s worth stepping back to ask: are they predicting the future, or selling it?
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Another Silver Bullet? What AI Tools Can Learn from the Last 50 Years of Developer Hype
The emergence of AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet has stirred debate about their long-term impact on software development. I’ve been in this game a while, which means I approach software innovation with a healthy dose of scepticism. I have seen lots of fashion trends — waves of developer productivity tools — some impactful, most not. From 4GLs to IDEs to low-code — each one promising to change the game, then fading into the background. Sound familiar? Every year there is somebody claiming they have a tool that can write your code for you. Is AI just the latest wave? I wondered if looking back at those old patterns — the hype, the crashes, the survivors — might tell us where this one’s going. Do those patterns from history tell me anything about the current trajectory of AI coding tools? The answer? Yes and no. Which, if you’ve ever worked in software, is probably the only honest answer you’ll get.
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What Software Development Can Learn from Double-Entry Bookkeeping
Double-entry bookkeeping revolutionised business by introducing a self-checking system of financial integrity. In the world of software, Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) does something strikingly similar — pairing each feature with a clear, testable description of how it should behave. Double-entry bookkeeping and automated software testing might seem worlds apart – one emerged in Renaissance-era accounting and the other in modern software development. Yet conceptually, they serve a similar purpose: both introduce systems of checks and balances to ensure integrity and accuracy in their respective domains. In accounting, double-entry bookkeeping requires every transaction to be recorded in two accounts (debits and credits) that must balance, creating an internal self-checking mechanism. In software, automated tests act as a parallel record of expected behaviour, continuously verifying that the code produces the intended outcomes. This post explores how a 500-year-old accounting innovation revolutionised financial record-keeping and how its spirit lives on in the way we write and test software today.
Disaster, rescue and recovery: Kickstarting delivery
70% of projects fail to deliver — and the cost is more than financial. Few broken programmes crash in a spectacular fashion. Most just quietly stall. You’ve got a roadmap. You’ve got people. You’ve got the rituals. But… nothing’s really moving. Instead you have sceptical stakeholders, wincing delivery teams, endless meetings and no actual decisions. Everyone is busy, but no one is sure what they’re delivering or why. Sound familiar? You’ve stalled.
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Choosing the Right Nearshoring Location: 9 Essential Criteria
I’m based in London, UK, but I’ve had teams in South America, USA, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, and India. Some of those locations worked for me and some didn’t.
In 2017 I opened a software development operation in Sofia (Bulgaria) for one of the world’s leading news organisations, headquartered in London (UK). Sofia met our criteria for selecting a nearshore location (and still does). I thought others might be interested in the nine criteria we used to select a nearshoring location. Particularly since I’ve inherited teams in other locations that did not meet these criteria.
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No Strategy, No Future: Why Companies That Drift, Sink
I was talking to my mate Ed the other day. It was one of those lets talk about anything conversations. We both have extensive consulting experience so perhaps it isn’t too surprising that we ended up talking about organisational strategy. Or the lack of it. A surprisingly high percentage of companies we have encountered lack an defined organisation strategy beyond “keep doing what we’re doing and hope”. Personally, I believe every company, regardless of size or industry, needs a strategy. Here’s why.
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Feel Focus Flow: A Practical Framework for Effective Leadership
The other day a CTO asked my advice on hiring a delivery director. I told him, “For me effective delivery has three elements: ‘Feel Focus Flow'”. Actually, the same three elements inform my leadership style as a CIO.
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Is Sofia Still a Smart Nearshoring Bet in 2025?
In 2017 I was asked to create a nearshore development team for one of the world’s leading news organisations, headquartered in London (UK). We explored other locations, including Cluj-Napoca, Porto, Kraków, and Poznan, but in the end chose Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria. At the time it was a great choice and I grew a fantastic team there. But time has marched on and lately, when talking to people about nearshoring destinations, I hear comments like, "Isn’t Sofia too expensive? Isn’t it saturated?" So I thought I’d have another look.
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