Writing
Engineering, delivery, and building things which last.
The Workshop
The Workshop: Example Mapping
A pattern for breaking a user story into rules and concrete examples in twenty-five minutes, so the team knows whether it's ready to build before the sprint starts. Facilitator's playbook, failure modes, and what to do with the cards afterwards.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
Impact Mapping: Connecting Work to Goals
The Greenbox team is shipping features, but are they the right ones? Impact Mapping connects engineering work to business goals -- and reveals that the obvious next feature isn't always the important one.
Read articleThe Workshop
The Workshop: Event Storming a Process
The default Event Storming session and the one you'll run most often. One process, one wall, everyone who touches it in the room, three hours. You leave with a precise shared model of the flow and a short list of the questions it raised. Where Big Picture looks for shape across a whole domain, Process Level looks for precision within one flow.
Read articleThe Workshop
The Workshop: Event Storming a Domain
The widest zoom, and Brandolini's own entry point to Event Storming. Stand a whole business — or a whole product — in front of one wall with everyone who touches it. The output isn't a design or a plan. It's one picture that every department recognises, and a shortlist of the places worth digging into next.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
Teaching Your LLM the Codebase: CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md
The Greenbox team's actual CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files. What goes in them, how they're structured, and how they shape the code an LLM generates.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
Teaching Your LLM the Codebase
Tom and Priya are both using LLMs to write code. They're getting different results. Not wrong -- different. CLAUDE.md is how the team teaches the LLM to write code like them.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
Behaviour-Driven Development: From Stories to Working Software
Example Maps become stories. Stories become tests. Tests drive code. And in a world where LLMs can write the code, the discovery work matters more than ever -- because the bottleneck isn't implementation any more. It's knowing what to build.
Read articleKitchen and Craft
The Quiet Jar in the Fridge
My last sourdough starter died through a quiet chain of postponed feeds. I'm starting a new one today. Most of what I'm learning as I begin again, I wish I'd known a decade earlier about codebases.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Sprint Planning: Turning Sticky Notes into Delivery
Walls of sticky notes, a prioritised backlog, concrete examples — and six weeks until the funding deadline. The team has done the discovery. Now they need a rhythm for delivery.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Generative AI
To LLMs… and Beyond!
LLMs are just one species in a growing zoo of AI models. Diffusion models, reasoning models, multimodal systems, open-weight vs closed — what they are, how they differ, and how to choose.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Example Mapping: Making Stories Concrete
Four colours of card, twenty-five minutes, and a vague story becomes something you can actually build. Example Mapping is the bridge between understanding and implementation -- and the technique you'll use more than any other.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Generative AI
How LLMs Actually Work
Tokens, transformers, attention, and the training pipeline -- what large language models actually do when they 'predict the next token', why they hallucinate, and why they're so good at code.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Event Storming: Building Shared Understanding
The Greenbox team covers a wall in sticky notes and discovers they've been building on assumptions. A deep dive into Event Storming -- the workshop that gets an entire domain out of one person's head and into shared understanding.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Retrospectives: Catching the Wrong Kind of Fast
A small team, a good idea, LLMs generating code at lightning speed, and four weeks of building the wrong thing. The first part of a series on getting from discovery to delivery without wasting everyone's time.
Read articleConsulting and Coding
The Value Is in Ideas, Not Code
LLMs have made code implementation almost trivial. The bottleneck has shifted from writing code to knowing what to ask for. Your library of patterns, concepts, and hard-won experience is now your competitive advantage.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Minimum Viable Product: The First Box
Twenty-two people signed up from a flyer at the Margaret River farmers market. The first delivery was a disaster -- wrong addresses, wilted spinach, and a box that arrived on Wednesday instead of Thursday. Maya cried in her car. Then she drove to the next address.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Customer Discovery: Before the First Line of Code
Maya grew up on a farm outside Margaret River. She left to study computer science, spent a decade in consulting, and came back to Perth with an idea that wouldn't let go: what if the best produce in Western Australia could reach people's doors every week?
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