Why Value Stream Mapping (VSM) Is One of the Strongest Tools for Any Transformation

In an era of rapid technological advancements and evolving customer expectations, businesses must continuously adapt and improve to remain competitive. So, businesses need to transform into a competitive self with efficient processes and collaborations for delivering their products and services. One of the most effective tools for achieving this is Value Stream Mapping (VSM). VSM is not just a tool; it’s a powerful methodology that helps organizations identify and eliminate waste, streamline processes, and drive meaningful transformation. Here, we will explore why VSM stands as one of the strongest tools for any transformation journey. What Is Value Stream Mapping? Value

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Q in DevOps

We all have been talking about it for a quite long time – Agility and DevOps (or DevSecOps). Inherently all of these include a lot of focus on the quality outcomes to the end-user with a faster turn-around time. While Agile talks about Value Generation, the DevOps pipeline is the vehicle that enables Value Delivery. This is all great. But today I want to share about the Q that many times are still a back-bencher. With my many engagements with different organisations across the globe, I see a pattern that at times disturbs me and I feel that it definitely

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GitFlow: Branching strategy for Git

  Today, I am publishing from a very old document (I created and published in 2017) on Branching strategy for Git (can be applied on other as well). This branching model is also known as GitFlow and is very powerful for scalability needs. 1. Source Code Configuration Management GIT is a distributed version control system that gives team members a wide flexibility in how they use version control to share and manage code. However, we need a balance between this flexibility and the need to collaborate and share code in a consistent manner. Team members publish, share, review, and iterate

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Pi-Hole: The sentry at your doorstep

Sorry for writing after such a long time. My R&D pipeline almost dried at the right end while the left end is overflowing. The backlog is getting longer. I promise to start improving my presence over time. So, won’t you like to have sentry at your doorstep to shoo away the bad elements or the unwanted guests? Definitely yes. This is equally important for your digital doorway as well. This is even more relevant as you have started working from home. Everyone at home are now working online and a whole lot of browsing and a whole lot of extra

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Microservices – Panacea or just another pattern?

Microservices is the keyword these days. And it is solving many problems, helping applications become agile and the support team getting better sleep. But, as it is catching the fire, it also raised eyebrows – is it necessary to have microservices in my application? The other day, I faced this question from such an angle. And, here I want to express my thoughts and experiences with microservices. First, let us accept that Microservices is just another design pattern. Each design pattern has a scope and is actually a path or approach to the solution to a design problem. So, microservices

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Why Shift Left? And how much?

The new mantra in town – “Shift Left“. So we wish to shift everything to left (except in the case of right-to-left, we shall do it otherwise). This is called the mantra of DevOps. Left of what? The delivery pipeline. The great thing that we often call CI/CD in the vocabulary of DevOps. The primary concept of DevOps is to reduce friction in the pipeline and enable early feedback to the stakeholders. This is more relevant when the team is using Agile process or methodology. It started with builds shifting left to have early feedback for success of a build.

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Breezing Devops on Bluemix

Bluemix is designed and build ground up taking care of Devops (the way to go for today’s development). It has very minimal task for the developer. As a developer, I remember the pain of going to a continuous integration system 10 years ago. It took so much of effort to convince the operations and infrastructure team to allow us to use a server as build server. And possibly doing all these took a very long time – around a year to demonstrate. The delay was not because of the technical issues, but operational issues took most of the time. Then

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Bluemix: The killer Blue!

IBM is bit new into the Cloud Based PaaS market, but came loaded with arsenals to make the competition blue! No wonder that market statistics is showing people moving from AWS and Azure to BlueMix. The base reason could be the simplicity and presentation. Let us look at few features I found to be so interesting to be put here: 1. Boiler Plates: Boiler plates are the basic application framework ready for extending to bring out a working app in little time. This is a great feature. Today when all startups are trying to grab the market with the leanest

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New Look, Responsive, Bootstrap et al

This has been in my mind for long time – why can’t I find a theme for my blog platform DotNetBlogEngine that is based on a responsive web design framework? After some serious search, I still failed to get one. So, I finally planned to take it up for myself. But was not getting enough time. Last week, I pulled up my sleeves and spent a night to work on the basic frame. And then some more time to give it a better shape. My earlier theme was based on Arthemia theme. I picked some of its design elements and

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Pi of Life: setting up a DLNA Server

Sorry for the late reporting! After setting up the Pi and setting up the NAS on it, the next step was to look for additional usage. One on high rank of need was to move the media in such a way that I can stream it to anywhere. I was actually already using a shared iTunes Library when I was using the HDD on the USB port of the router. But the performance was not that good. Plus I was stuck to iTunes on my laptops. Plus, it did not support any TV or other devices without iTunes. At times,

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