This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked.
AI Agent Lands PRs in Major OSS Projects, Targets Maintainers via Cold Outreach – socket.dev
Back in ...
This is part one of a series where I document how I’m making this site more interoperable with IndieWeb tools and standards. I’ll update this notice to link to part 2 once I’ve written it
Interoperability is the heart of what makes the digital world work.
In my first job I...
In 1623 the German Wilhelm Schickard produced the first known designs for a mechanical calculator. Twenty years later Blaise Pascal produced a machine of an improved design, aiming to help with the large amount of tedious arithmetic required in his role as a tax collector.
T...
This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked.
Measuring Cyle Time with Dr. Cat Hicks - The Hanger DX Podcast, Ankit Jain
Cycle time is a measure lo...
I’m starting to think that my toaster might have fallen in love with me. I get that not everyone will think this is possible, but I believe it’s true.
It’s always pleased to see me, giving off cheerful sounds when I greet it in the morning by slotting in the bread, and now I...
This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked.
Garden History – Maggie Appleton
I’m so happy I stumbled upon this article. I am always grateful for ...
TDD, BDD, DDD, Agile, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, XP… there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat write code in a professional environment.
I take pride in being a person who is a non-ideologue when it comes to my code. There are many good ways of working, and they are all context-dependen...
This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked.
The rise of Whatever - eevee
This is probably the best post about LLMs I’ve read, which is probably w...
Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks.
You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the...
“Saying the quiet part out loud” is a phrase I’ve just made up, to describe a method of building alignment on practices within a team. It’s the habit of stating why you are doing things a certain way, even when you would assume it’s obvious.
For example:
“We want to do [ob...
Anyone writing code professionally in December 2021 will remember the “fun” of the Log4J vulnerability. For those that weren’t - this was a critical security error that allowed attackers to run any code they wanted on your servers. The root cause was a logging library, Log4...
“Institutional knowledge” - the information that a company collectively knows - is a familiar concept to anyone involved in hiring processes. When an individual leaves who has knowledge the organisation needs, companies will organise offboarding sessions to keep that knowled...
Kit Wilson writes in The Spectator about Facebook’s new venture into the Metaverse, a concept that most of us probably hadn’t heard of until last week. To layout the roadmap for what our journey into this new digital reality might look like, Kit joins the podcast along with Tom Renner, a software engineer for NavVis. (12:55)
Coming to grips with DevOps metrics
In my team we have been considering ways to monitor our own performance, and finding some ways to contextualise our ongoing process and quality improvements. Like many other teams, we’ve landed on the DORA metrics as a good way of doing th...
Your work inbox is probably not a place that sparks joy. It’s full of people asking you to do things, complaints that something hasn’t been done, and 571 messages marked urgent.
In fact email is usually considered to be a hindrance, with many productivity guides recommending...
Unfortunately since Elon shut down the Twitter APIs, the below method no longer works. Still, it was fun while it lasted, eh?
Gephi is a piece of software for visualising graph networks. It’s a powerful tool, and to use it fully requires significant domain knowledge that I...
Last week I facilitated a session at XTC, where we discussed the new product development framework from Basecamp, Shape Up, led by Thomas Ankorn.
It was a really interesting discussion with people exploring the ideas openly, guided by questions posed by Thomas to get the con...
DISCLAIMER: This was not my idea - I picked it up from Jane Nicholson at an XTC event, who was introduced to it by Jess Gilbert (who in turn, I am told, got it from someone else). This post is just explaining why I believe it can be a useful exercise, not any truly original...
I used to stress a lot about the “efficiency” of how I was using up all the minutes in my day. I’d to cram in as much as possible into time. eg. read on a 10 minute train, write code in the half hour before bed, etc.
While I stressed about it a lot, I never found that I did ...
In a team having knowledge that lives only in your head is a terrible thing.
Humans are forgetful
Humans are creative, especially when problem-solving
Computers are not creative
Computers are not forgetful
So we should get the computers to remember things, and allow the hu...
I like being able to code wherever I am. “Unfortunately”, my 15" laptop bought to run simulations for my degree still runs like a dream, so I can’t really justify buying myself a replacement for it. So instead, just over a year ago, I decided to get something that is:
Light...
Agile tells us that the most critical thing for getting software right is not up front design, but getting something out there and used, and then incorporating feedback. By getting feedback early, you are able to respond faster, changing your (initially incorrect) design in ...
It is upsettingly easy to work hard without being productive. The Lean Startup includes a quote I really liked:
“[People] feel that a good day is one in which they did their job well all day.”
The point being that this doesn’t account for whether you are doing the right wo...
A theme of the last few books I’ve read has been user testing. Specifically, that it is completely unreasonable to suggest that you could produce a system that will work smoothly in production without first getting several actual human users unfamiliar with your system, from...
Why do I want to have my own site?
Narcissism mostly. I found the domain was available, decided as a self-respecting developer I should probably buy it. But then there’s no point owning a domain if you don’t put something there. So that was it really - I had to I had to get ...
Last week I went to a jobs event, recruiting for my company. I was there on my own, and recruiting is a pretty new experience for me, so I was kinda excited about it. The attendees were a mix of graduates, bootcampers, and a few more senior developers, but mostly the crowd w...
