The 2026 Resolution: The “Tech-Powered” Human
While my new neck discs are a feat of medical engineering, they’ve inspired me to look at how I can use technology in other areas of my life. My resolution for 2026 isn’t about “doing more”—it’s about leveraging technology to be more present.
After a year of pushing through pain, I want to use the tools available to me to boost my efficiency while protecting my health. Here is how I’m planning to fuel my comeback:
Boosting Family Life: I’m leaning into smart-home automation and shared digital planning to remove the “mental load” of household management. By letting tech handle the grocery lists and schedules, I can focus 100% on being present with my family as I recover.

Healing with Intent
This year is going to look a little different. There will be physical therapy, plenty of rest, and a steady climb back to full strength. But with 12 months of pain finally behind me and two new discs to support me, I’ve never felt more optimistic.
Recovery isn’t just about getting back to “normal”; it’s about building a life that is more balanced and intentional than before. Here’s to a 2026 that is tech-enabled, family-focused, and—most importantly—moving forward.

“The goal isn’t just to heal, but to thrive.”

From Titanium to Transformation: My 2026 Journey Starts Now

If I had to give 2025 a headline, it would be change with purpose. This year stretched me in the best ways—stepping into new leadership responsibilities, growing a team, tightening the way we ship, and learning to listen harder than I speak. Here’s the personal version of that story—no brand names, no customer specifics—just what changed in me and how I showed up.

Stepping Up: The Promotion That Changed My Calendar (and Mindset)

Early in the year I moved into a bigger role. The real shift wasn’t the title; it was the lens. I stopped optimising only for “what I can build” and started optimising for “what the team can deliver repeatedly.”
That meant trading some deep maker time for clearer goals, sharper priorities, and better guardrails. I learned that great leadership isn’t louder—it’s more consistent.

Building the Team: Capability Before Headcount

I focused on capability first: the skills we need, the outcomes we own, and the habits that make our work sustainable. Then I hired for those.
Recruiting became less about “finding a unicorn” and more about complementary strengths: pairing systems thinkers with strong communicators, matching builders with patient debuggers, and balancing speed with steadiness. The win wasn’t filling seats—it was creating a team that could cover for each other and still raise the bar.

Shipping More (and Smarter): Extensions That Reduce Friction

This was a shipping year. We delivered and refreshed a number of small-but-mighty extensions that simplify everyday workflows—things that make sending, tracking, auditing, and revising feel lighter.
My guiding principle was simple: remove one step, add one check. Fewer clicks, clearer states, better logs. The result was a set of releases that felt invisible in the best way: they just worked.

How we kept momentum:

• Micro‑sprints: fifteen‑minute weekly checkpoints to unblock decisions fast.
• One‑page runbooks: enough guidance to get anyone productive, without a wall of text.
• “Prove it’s live” checks: lightweight verification steps built into our deployment flow.

Owning the Plumbing: Pipelines, Permissions, and Environment Boundaries

Shipping more forced me to become a student of the plumbing—credentials, pipelines, environments, and deployment rights. When automation faltered, I documented a clear manual path to production with artefact verification and rollback notes.
I also nudged us toward true test vs. production separation, tightened access, and wrote down the things future‑me would otherwise forget. Unsexy work, essential outcomes.

Raising the Floor: Security, Compliance, and Clarity

Trust isn’t a feature you bolt on—it’s a minimum standard you live by.
This year I helped translate policy into practice: tightening recording rules for sessions, clarifying what AI tools are appropriate in meetings, and setting sensible defaults that make safe behaviour the path of least resistance.
I learned to treat security as an experience challenge: make the right thing obvious, quick, and documented.

Listening More: Field Signals, Release Notes, and Community Threads

A big part of my growth was learning to listen for signal—especially from upgrade notes and practitioner conversations. Those discussions surfaced tiny changes in behaviour that could become big friction later.
By folding that feedback into our defaults and help text, we prevented issues from turning into tickets. Quiet wins are still wins.

What Changed in Me

• From fixes to systems: I stopped “hero‑patching” and started designing repeatable ways to prevent the same issues.
• From shipping to safeguarding: I now see deployments as both delivery and defence—verify, limit blast radius, document.
• From speaking to listening: Feedback isn’t noise; it’s an early warning system if you’re humble enough to hear it.

The Quiet Wins I’m Proud Of

• A deployment playbook that works even when automation doesn’t—with verification built in.
• Extensions that reduce friction and feel intuitive—less clicking, clearer states, better audit trails.
• Policies translated into practical steps—not just rules, but workflows anyone can follow.

Looking Ahead to 2026

Next year is about consistency at scale: fully automated pipelines, cleaner environment boundaries, and guardrails that make secure, compliant delivery the default. My personal goal is to spend more time coaching and documenting, so the team can move faster with fewer surprises.

Thanks for reading—and for being part of the change. If this year taught me anything, it’s that growth isn’t about doing more; it’s about doing the right things, repeatedly, together.

2025 a professional summary

Everyone knows the negatives of 2020, I won’t list them, there are many. However, we, as a human race, tend to focus on the negatives too much, so I will list some positives to think about as we head towards 2021. Pandora’s box has opened, now it’s time to find the glimmer of hope.

2020 saw achievements by many, some of these were driven by need and necessity, others were years in the making. And, whilst the year as a whole may have taken the shine off them, we should celebrate them.

• We sent people into space, on a reusable rocket and capsule. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_FIaPBOJgc
• Scientists worked at incredible rates to work on a vaccine for Covid-19, resulting (at this point in time) in at least 3 or 4 viable vaccines that could be available to the public before the year ends. – https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-vaccines
• Innovation and the ability to adapt has meant that whilst some companies folded, and many individuals have sadly lost their jobs or been furloughed, some companies were smart enough to rise to the challenge. Digital Transformation strategies and utilisation of technology have helped lots of companies overcome the challenge, in some cases increase their output, or in other cases adapt their products and services to meet new demands. In the UK, for example, we had many manufacturing companies come together to use their dormant machinery to make ventilators, PPE, girders for temporary hospitals, etc.
• We are still here. The planet hasn’t been totally destroyed, and whilst our mental health teeters on the edge, many of us have found a new appreciation for those around us whilst learning new techniques and behaviours for getting through the day, week, month, and year. It is these new found skills and attitudes to life that will see us in good stead for the years ahead, whether the next event is closer to home, or on a global scale.

Ok, so not going to lie, I struggled to find enough positive stories from this year, but those above are the ones I believe in, the ones that have peaked my interests and allowed me to have some positive vibes to get through.

On a personal/career level, 2020 was supposed to be a year of self-discovery and development. Starting a new role in October 2019 with a brand new remit and direction was incredibly scary, but a challenge I relished. Fortunately, that role survived the turmoil around Covid-19 and I’m still here to tell many tales. I have been able to upskill, adding to my “jack of all trades” mantra that sees me now capable of some very interesting and potentially dangerous things, as well as embedding myself into a well established and very experienced team, relatively seamlessly. 2021 will see me continue in this role, with the same people and adding various activities along the way. I am glad for this consistency in my work life as the world around us continues to be so unpredictable.

2021 here we come

https://www.epicor.com/en-uk/press-room/news-releases/clayton-dubilier-rice-to-acquire-epicor-software-corporation-from-kkr/

On a personal note this will be the 4th acquisition/takeover/purchase of a company I work for in 5 years, see previous posts for notes on those!

The Future is Bright…

It was mentioned in part one that the infrastructure project effectively became a DevOps implementation project, and I’ll try to delve into the bits I can discuss in this post. Firstly there’s the inheritance; over 300 environments, many with specific mods for specific customers, and the remaining with what we call “Extended Solutions” – productized mods effectively. Then there was all the code itself, fortunately, the existing dev team has a fantastic grasp of the deep dark secrets of Git and I have enough of a basic understanding to pick up where others left off, but then, something new to myself came out, and that was the builds of the code. Debug or Release, MSBuild versions, semantic versioning, Git Flow… you get the idea. All very complicated to me at the time, but now it’s in my veins!

Previously the team used an old, unsupported, broken version of Jenkins to build their code, with definitions for each Git Branch, some with bat files, some hardcoded in the Jenkins config screen, basically a mess, and different rules for different people. Well, I like to standardize, so we scrapped the old, and brought in the new. Cue the amazing concept that is Continuous Integration. Having some basic experience with this in Azure DevOps (remember this post?) the concept was not new, however, implementing with Jenkins was a new experience. I managed to inherit a new blank Jenkins server, but first thing I did was reverse proxy via IIS and get it secured with an internal SSL certificate, as well as connect up to the Corporate Active Directory and restrict to our team only, then we got a service account from Corp IT and locked the server down, only myself and Domain Admins can get into the back end, and now we have a secured build server. Why so secure when it’s all internal? Well, that’s because the CTO office allowed us to have the corporate digital cert for code signing so long as it only existed in one, locked-down place. We can call it via the Jenkins application side but not extract, manipulate or otherwise interact with it. With this new updated (and updateable) Jenkins server, plus a couple of useful plugins (Blue Ocean is a must) we have a fantastic platform to manage and analyze our build process. The main feature we are utilizing is the Multibranch Pipelines via Jenkinsfile. This Jenkinsfile is written in groovy and is basically a set of instructions that define a build, for example, we can say build this solution, sign using that certificate and publish the artifacts so we can download afterward. The huge advantage for us is because we build a solution for multiple ERP versions, we can have up to 8 exes output at the end, and we now have one screen to grab them from, regardless of what Git branch we built for. On the subject of Git branches, due to the multibranch pipeline functionality, once our Jenkinsfile is pulled into Master, it will then filter down to all subsequent branches, and with this feature enabled, Jenkins will detect any new branches that were pushed back to the origin with that Jenkinsfile includes. I’ve previously written about VS Code and all the wondrous things it does, but we also discovered a Jenkinsfile checker in the form of https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=janjoerke.jenkins-pipeline-linter-connector. This tool allows us to check syntax, against our own Jenkins server and therefore ensures an accurate rule definition every time we adjust a build. It’s time-savers like these that have boosted the team’s productivity significantly, I recently tweeted about this improvement, as I took hold of an existing codebase and fully integrated it into our new philosophy within an hour or so!

A large part of the battle has been documenting the configuration and the overall process as well as educating colleagues (primarily developers) about how we are using these concepts and tools. I’ve found the majority of developers know the concepts and will have their own experiences with Git and CI/CD but until you document what the process should be in the exact circumstances, they don’t necessarily see the advantages or understand just how powerful these changes are, and more importantly how it improves consistency and productivity across the team. The improvements are already showing for us, and I fully expect that to continue!

Some reference material for a few of the things discussed in the post above:

• Jenkins Multibranch pipelines
• Jenkins behind IIS Reverse Proxy
• Jenkins CI for .Net
• Basic Jenkins for .Net CI
• Git Intro
• Git Flow
• Bitbucket Server (incumbent Git server)
• Sourcetree (preferred Git UI tool)
• Fork (alternate Git UI tool)

Q1 FY20 Part 2

My first task, set on Day 1 was to own the migration of systems from one domain to the other. Those who have followed any of my previous posts in the last 4 years will be aware I went from small local company to global ERP vendor overnight (June 1st 2016) by way of an acquisition. Well imagine moving that small dev team’s environments into a very well protected and governed American corporate ecosystem, it was effectively sat on for 3 years, and corporate policies dictated we migrated and shutdown the old!

Deciding where to start was easy… Spend a week or so working on testing out a couple of theories, having done domain migrations previously, and work with internal IT teams to put in the relevant requests and procedures to ensure those theories are robust, scalable and secure. Three weeks in and hours had been wasted scripting out a copy and paste scenario, basically a load of PowerShell scripts to do Find/Replace style blitz across 1000s of files, 10 different ERP versions, 200+ development environments (with Databases). Only the one slight snag, even after reworking permissions and roping IT into a 3TB file copy across 2 unconnected domains…. Internally developed environmnent management tooling, which with all its bells and whistles, was not supportive of the new domain, and had hardcoded ties to the older domain’s file server, oops.

Rethink time… Plan B – the best of the lot. Copying databases is one of those things I literally wrote the manual on for Epicor ERP, so that’s easy; building Windows servers has been the last 10 years of my life, so again, sorted; that leaves my understanding of the tooling that sits in the middle, well, fortunately, my new desk backs on to the lovely chap who wrote that tool, even though he now runs our R&D division, so with a few conversations and about 8 lines of code he rebuilt it for me to work on the new environments, allowing me to fully document it as it got deployed and hey presto, a working blank set of servers ready for migrated data was born within a week; including the ability to build any version of ERP 10, using blank, demo or customer data – depending on whether it’s development or QA work, and the ability to use all the latest features and more importantly the latest development tools, by way of Chocolatey!

The next few weeks consisted of identifying what needed to be moved, and what we could spin up later on demand, the resulting list was around 120 required environments, mostly because of productised “Extended Solutions” which need to be built for each version of ERP 10 we support. But also ongoing customer projects, version uplifts, test environments for developers to test their own theories and boost their skills etc. This was a very slow and involved process, per Environment/DB it was not too bad, but in Part 2 (when I write it) I’ll go through how my domain migration project became an environment and process improvement project, featuring Git, Jenkins, CI/CD and

The good news is my Domain Migration which we scheduled to be fully complete, i.e old domain shut down for 24th December 2019, was in fact completed on 6th December 2019, so despite the slightly wasted 3 weeks of testing, scripting, and familiarisation, with all parties on board we (sadly) shutdown the Dot Net IT domain at 17:30 that evening!

Q1 FY20 Part 1

Remember you can always find me on LinkedIn also: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanaward/

The CV

• Installs/Config for ERP systems including initial system design
• Technical training of customers in those ERP systems
• Technical management of escalated issues (across the world)
• Cross-team liason for high profile or highly escalated customers
• Coordination of international team of installations consultants
• Development of internal tooling for installs/ technical consulting
• Management of environments for wider team

From my recent posts it’s obvious which areas on that list have received the most focus over the last few months, notably the last two, which is where all the DevOps/Code posts are centred around. The reason so much focus has been on this, and I’ll add at this point a lot of it out of work hours, is because it’s something I enjoy, something I’ve been on the edge of before, and an area of technology that I personally believe we should all be at least aware of, and able to understand the basic principles of.

DevOps was a term coined many years before it became mainstream. Mike Loukides wrote a 20 page book called “What is DevOps” back in June 2012, which is published by the world renowned O’Reilly Media. (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026822.do) That’s some time before I came across the term, although it seems I was already aware of some of the practices that now come under that umbrella. Back then I was managing E-Commerce sites, writing PHP websites against MySQL databases and moving a very static, cumbersome “tin-factory” infrastructure over to more dynamic, sustainable growth-capable platform. With a little more time and knowledge at that time I would’ve potentially moved in different directions. I am now starting to close that circle a little from the other side.

For me, career development is crucial, I am more than happy to stay with one company, or in one role, but I will always push to make more of myself, learn new things, get involved with everything possible and break down any and all barriers. I don’t do this to benefit myself, I see it as an opprtunity for me to be a benefit to those around me, both customers and colleagues.

Outside of DevOps activities over the recent months I’ve also been working on my presentation skills, with opportunities to present to colleagues and customers about various technical topics, including System Adminstration, upcoming product changes, best practices etc. This is in part due to being given more free reign with my current role, while we work out what my future roles may or may not include, and that’s if any change at all! In the background, the day to role keeps me busy, planning installs, speaking to new customers about how to deploy, speaking to existing customers about upgrades or enhancements to their systems, all the fun stuff that keeps money in the bank and roofs over heads!

The next few months may get a little busy, well hopefully they will, and all the good stuff will be posted when the chances arise.

This and That

If you do happen to like the posts on here, then please do say so; retweet, Facebook share, LinkedIn, whatever, it would be great to get more of my content out there, and more of you on here!

Also If you have any post requests or tech questions, please send those over too, Twitter is possibly the best for that @jaward916

Secondly, apologies for the lack of posts during February. Over the Christmas break I had some good ideas which I made lots of notes for then came up with the 4 posts during Januray, however the ideas have dried up (already) and family related things have meant less free weekends. The weekday’s are taken up with the job, typically Sundays are when I get “me” time to do some techy stuff for my benfit rather than for customers!

Finally…

Whilst I don’t have a nice full topic to write up for this week (I promise there are some ideas bouncing around in my head) what I do have is a snippet of 2018 so far in my world of tech/code/software etc.

During January I spent many hours getting to grips with a new major release of the software I work with, as I’m a little bit of a nerd, a lot of those hours were spent in my own time, drilling down into things, working scenarios out, deplyoment strategies etc. What I ended up with by last week was a full test scenario, remeniscient of a real world deployment. Effectivley emulating what a customer would have. The really cool thing is this allows me to very quickly test out scenarios, when a customer reports something “not working” I can run it through my servers and give them an answer same day along the lines of (usually) “try this, I think you’ve done X in the wrong place”. This is in no way a bypass to my wonderful colleagues in Support, but more of a way to assist the customer with getting their deployment up and running. I don’t generally delve into the applications, I’m not that kind of consultant. What I do is design deployments and implement them, I get the back end of a system up and running. The latest version included quite a few new technical enhancements, so getting experienced with them is an essential part of me being able to do my job!

February hasseen a few more interesting engagements for me, site visits all over the place (on top of delivering 2 training courses during January), with some more lined up, possibly even abroad.

What I am being asked to do now is anlyse, review, and in some cases redesign or reimplement deployments. Not because what they have was done wrong to start with, far from it, but more to help them become future-proof, employ best practices and become more agile as the world around us is changing, and the software adjusts to match. There’s no wheel reinvention, just a set of new tyres here and a bit of air there.

I write on here a lot about SQL Server as it is the underlying DB server platform for all systems I support. Another area of SQL that has always interested me is SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), basically a very smart, sometimes fiddly report generation toolset. What I have been able to do over the last few weeks is take some reports, rip them apart, analyse a few minor but irritating issues and develop solutoins to those problems. The strange thing is that I’ve not been trained in SSRS, or had the change do do anything with it prior ot this. I just saw an issue, delved straight into the SSRS builder and worked it out, for myself. I forgot I had those abillites and it’s been refreshing to remember how good I used to be solving new problems.

I’m thinking some SSRS tips in a post may be some decent content in the future, think I’ll build the scrapbook up on those!

That’s it for an update, I’ve also updated the About page on this site to reflect the last 2 years!

Few things to cover…

On Wednesday, 15th November, 2017 at 08:30 I arrived at the Priest House Hotel, Castle Donnington, UK with an unusual, previously unknown kind of nervous excitement. I had arrived, suited and booted, laptop in tow and ready to showcase myself, represent my company and embrace this wonderful community.
Only 2 weeks prior had I received the invitation to present on Server and SQL Optimisation, a topic I know a fair amount about but the concept of presenting at this level was new to me. That said I think I may have mentioned previously that it was something that interested me, so it was potentially my own doing.
2 weeks to prepare a presentation isn’t a huge amount of time when you have a day job, and a home life to work around, but I relished the challenge and got stuck in, only a few days after the initial request and approval did I discover that I in fact had 2x 1 hour presentation slots…ah… a slightly bigger challenge, but again one to relish.
With 4 days to spare I had 2 presentations written, and a full mirror test complete, with only a slight worry on timings.
Fast forward back to 09:30 on the day and the first presentation begins, 30+ people in the room staring at me wondering how this will go down. 1 hour goes by, maybe a bit more, and it seems to be going ok. The questions are flooding in, I’m somehow managing to respond to all of them, answering everything thrown at me. The feedback continues into the break, a number of people saying “great presentation”, “thanks for the information”, “I’m going to look at X when I get back”. Wow, I actually resonated with some of these people. Bearing in mind that many have been in the Epicor and technology worlds far longer than I have, they seemed to all pick something up from the first one. Great, confidence restored, let’s nail the second presentation.
Before I knew it lunch was served, I was still conversing with various people; customers, partners, ex-colleagues and current ones. It wasn’t until I realised only a sausage roll was left in the room that I had gone through 2 hours of presenting and almost an full hour extra of chatting on only 1 coffee, a mini cinnamon swirl and this sausage roll!
Never before had I talked so much tech on so little caffeine, it was at that point I realised that knowledge, preparation and adrenaline we key to this day.

The EUG EMEA 2017 conference seemed to be a huge success across the 3 days from everything I have seen, the middle day on which I presented was focussed on non-product specific IT related topics. I think the fact I came up against the hot topic of GDPR in my session slots and still had a fairly full room was testament to the fact the nobody knows everything, and everyone wants to know a little more on the subjects of Server and SQL optimisation. The feedback at the time certainly reflects that.

I want to once again thank everyone in the EUG EMEA team for having me, the customers who attended the sessions for their perseverance, great questions and feedback and Epicor for letting me attend and present at fairly short notice. Hopefully this will be the start of a new chapter for me as I look to push on into 2018.

For more info on the Epicor Users Group (EUG) please check out the following:
Web: http://www.epicorusers.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/eug_emea
Conference Twitter: #EUGEMEA2017

Epicor Users Group EMEA 2017 Conference