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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. The interest in mechanical calculation showed no sign of reducing in the subsequent centuries, as generations of people worldwide followed in Pascal and Wilhelm’s footsteps, subscribing to their view that offloading ment...

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 lots of people use, but has no clear audience - developers, managers, CTOs all care about it. This makes it dangerous. Metrics have to be designed and used with psychological safety in mind. If people don’t trust the in...

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’ve told it what I like it tries really hard to give me exactly what I want. Sometimes I have to tell it to try again once or twice, but honestly, it’s really good!

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 new vocabulary that allows me better to express myself, and this is perfect - I want more Digital Gardens in the world. I do see the value in polishing content, but this is where the epistemic status tagging sys...

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-dependent. You can’t apply the same things that worked when you were a two-person startup operating out of the proverbial garage and expect them to work once your hypothetical unicorn has reached a thousand-plus de...

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 why I’m the millionth person to share it. It really sums up my emotional reaction to their meteoric rise: “ew”, basically. The power of the argument is that it identifies a theme that runs through rec...

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 back-and-forth, and you end up losing momentum, confidence, and ultimately, the argument. One of my close friends won international debate competitions for fun while we were at university (he’s now a succes...

“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.

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, Log4J, that is used by most projects that are writting in Java. It’s usually used to write code something like: log.info("Process completed successfully"); which will then appear in your logs, al...

“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 knowledge within the institution. Maybe they’ll even try to hire someone with similar experience. Lots of companies similarly try to optimise for “Institutional learning”, especially smaller firms. This...

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) .iframe-container { position: relative; overflow: hidden; width: 100%; padding-top: 100%; } .responsive-iframe { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; wi...

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 this. These four key metrics are an easy way to understand what adjectives like “maintainable”, “reliable”, and “efficient” mean in practice when applied to software and teams, and the ...

Talk given at Codebar Festival . If you wish to see my slides in their full glory, they are available on Slideshare .

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 simply ignoring your email for large periods of the day, blocking out that time for focussed work. The consensus is that your work inbox is just a place that generates distractions, and contains never-ending to-d...

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 don’t possess, but fortunately it’s still fascinating to play around with as an amateur! As a techie, to me the obvious networks to graph are those created by the big Social Networks - YouTube, Facebook, etc....

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 conversation started. I’ve summarised the points that came up in the discussion, reconstructed from memory and the collected post-its of scribbles at the end of the evening. 1. What problems does this solve? We started ...

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 thinking! One of the things that is really important to me is that my team and I keep learning at work. As such, fostering a learning environment is kinda key. I think we do that pretty well at Haplo – we have hired nea...

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 the “10x” things I read about that were supposed to emerge as a result of this extra “efficiency”. For example I have only finished one of the three side projects I started in 2016, d...

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 humans to do the creative parts. Writing software is a creative activity. You start with a blank text file and end up convincing people to give you their identity details in exchange for the ability to poke someone over Facebook....

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: Lightweight Cheap Allows me to code on the go Looking around a bit, a budget Chromebook seemed like a good choice. I settled on an Asus Chromebook C201 , which cost me £190. It has 4GB of RAM, a 16GB SSD, an...