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    <title>Shut The Goat Up — Writing</title>
    <link>https://shutthegoatup.com/writing/</link>
    <description>Shut The Goat Up is a product engineering company from London. We build software that takes on the incumbents — real-time 3D, payments, and the platforms underneath them.</description>
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    <copyright>Shut The Goat Up Ltd</copyright>
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      <title>My biggest fuck up</title>
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      <description>Twenty-two years old, first day as a developer, production database dropped. What happened next is the whole argument for what an engineering culture actually is.</description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Culture</category>
      <category>Reliability</category>
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      <title>Lies, damned lies, and complexity</title>
      <link>https://shutthegoatup.com/writing/lies-damned-lies-and-complexity/</link>
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      <description>We built the first cloud in Europe and replaced the hypervisor in 30 days when Oracle pulled the licences. Most of what gets called complexity is just ignorance with a talking point attached.</description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Platform engineering</category>
      <category>Culture</category>
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      <title>The Hiring Pool</title>
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      <description>“Your standards are too high” and “your process is too long” are both right and both wrong. On turning down big tech, and building a hiring process that qualifies competency without taking three months.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Hiring</category>
      <category>Leadership</category>
      <category>Culture</category>
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      <title>Continuous Improvement</title>
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      <description>The no-asshole rule works when you also pay top of market and qualify competency. Without those, it becomes the tool that removes the person saying the company is not very good at this.</description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Leadership</category>
      <category>Culture</category>
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      <title>Culture of Competency</title>
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      <description>“Technology is easy; culture is hard” is a sales pitch. In a business that sells software, the engineering org is the engine that delivers revenue, and its competency is the culture.</description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Leadership</category>
      <category>Hiring</category>
      <category>Culture</category>
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    <item>
      <title>3 reasons you shouldn't hire a Technical CTO</title>
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      <description>A straight-faced case for hiring a visionary who works on the org rather than in it, staffing eight layers of oversight above the developer, and then offshoring the developer.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Leadership</category>
      <category>Hiring</category>
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      <title>Nobody expects the thundering herd</title>
      <link>https://shutthegoatup.com/writing/nobody-expects-the-thundering-herd/</link>
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      <description>Servers fell over every lunchtime. A blocking query backed up the syncs, the retries took out the cache, the cache took out auth, and 40,000 customers stopped trading. Pulling the security group bought a day at a time.</description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 19 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Reliability</category>
      <category>Platform engineering</category>
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      <title>The Iron Grip of Legacy IT</title>
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      <description>Six months into a transformation programme, told as a horror story: the AWS account that never arrives, the Windows EDR running under Wine, and the change board that approves it.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Platform engineering</category>
      <category>Security</category>
      <category>Culture</category>
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      <title>End user devices don't matter</title>
      <link>https://shutthegoatup.com/writing/end-user-devices-dont-matter/</link>
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      <description>A CISO, a consultancy and nine and a half million dollars of endpoint tooling. You cannot secure the end user device — so stop putting it inside the trusted network.</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Security</category>
      <category>Platform engineering</category>
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      <title>DevOps is going to get you hacked</title>
      <link>https://shutthegoatup.com/writing/devops-is-going-to-get-you-hacked/</link>
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      <description>Three consultants stand up Bitbucket, Jenkins and AWS, and it passes assurance. A mistyped username, credentials in a public repo and a token on a compromised laptop — none of which a pentest looks at.</description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Security</category>
      <category>Platform engineering</category>
      <category>Culture</category>
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      <title>Learning from Capital One's misery</title>
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      <description>A misconfigured firewall, an over-privileged role, unencrypted PII and nobody watching the egress. Four failures, and the peer review, SAST, DAST and monitoring that catch each one.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <category>Security</category>
      <category>Platform engineering</category>
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