9 things Westworld can teach us about software engineering

Watching Westworld recently, I couldn’t stop seeing parallels with software engineering. In particular, the series is rife with cautionary tales about how not to do software development. In this article, I’ll share 9 lessons we can take from the show to improve the effectiveness of software engineering teams – and hopefully prevent them from going “full Westworld”…

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Aggressively tuning Cosmos DB (the long way round)

How many ways are there to tune Cosmos DB? In our (eventually pretty desperate) attempts to coax it into scaling nicely, we tried 9 approaches. As they became more arcane, we saw diminishing returns. Some were flat-out counter-productive! The eventual solution in our case was a single-line fix (how embarrassing!), but the journey was really interesting. It’s this journey that I want to share today.

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Reticulating splines…

It’s been a little while since my last post, so I thought I’d better do a quick status check. What have I been up to recently? What on earth could possibly keep me so busy that I’ve been unable to blog? It’s mainly a mix of work-stuff and a big project. Read on to find out more about both, as well as a few other bits and pieces, and also maybe some teasers about future posts.

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