Automated pipelines have become an integral part of our daily workflow. As the pipelines become increasingly important, the demands placed on them rise proportionally.

As with many things, a great pipeline operates seamlessly in the background, while a poorly designed one becomes a constant irritation.

Are you publishing your artefacts every time the pipeline runs, running all steps in a sequence, or installing all the tools every time a new build starts?

In this talk, I will address these antipatterns and more I have encountered during my work as a consultant, explaining why I consider them such and what you should do instead.

After listening to this talk, you will better understand what makes a pipeline great and concrete things you can do to improve it and shorten the feedback loop.

Stuck in a legacy system that needs modernizing? Feel like the best course of action is to throw it in a dumpster, light it on fire and rewrite everything from scratch - maybe even in a different language?

Hold that thought. While it may be tempting to start a rewrite, rewrites of complicated systems rarely succeed for multiple reasons. Chief among them is time and the fact that not everything can stop and wait for the rewrite, but another important contributor is the second system effect, which usually causes rewrites to be over-engineered and bloated in comparison to what they replace

In this talk, I'll share my experiences with the Strangler Fig pattern, a better approach where the original system is gradually replaced by breaking out or rewriting parts into separate systems. I'll also talk about combining this with Domain Driven Design and how to use the new design to execute an Inverse Conway Manoeuvre to ensure you're working with Conway's law and not against it.