My place to put things| My place to put things
My place to put things| My place to put things
My place to put things| My place to put things
My place to put things| My place to put things
My place to put things| My place to put things
My place to put things| My place to put things
My place to put things| My place to put things
“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.| Posts on My place to put things
Anyone writing code professionally in December 2021 will remember the “fun”oftheLog4Jvulnerability. 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, allowing you to track your app...| Posts on My place to put things
“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 makes a lot of s...| Posts on My place to put things
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)| Posts on My place to put things
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 provide a way of compar...| Posts on My place to put things
Talk given at Codebar Festival. If you wish to see my slides in their full glory, they are available on Slideshare.| Posts on My place to put things
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. It’s not hugely surprising to find that mostly these graphs mostly aren’t available for querying, but excitingly there is a plugin...| Posts on My place to put things
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 by l...| Posts on My place to put things
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 nearl...| Posts on My place to put things
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, despite promising myself t...| Posts on My place to put things
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 Facebo...| Posts on My place to put things
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, and weighs under ...| Posts on My place to put things
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 small steps towards a better solution. This works better in practice than designing everything at the start very carefully, which feels rigid and inflexible in the face of new information over the course of a project.| Posts on My place to put things
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 work. This is a really common trap to fall in to. I know I have often worked really hard on something and produced code I’m very happy with, only to talk to my boss or the client and find that nobody else seems to be n...| Posts on My place to put things
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 your clients or in a related industry, to road-test the system. I think anyone can see that this is a good idea. It’s far too easy to make assumptions about the users’ requirements or use cases. Without user testing...| Posts on My place to put things
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 my act together and actually write the thing. I enjoy developing I’m a person who finds it hard to devote time outside of office hours to write code. I suspect it’s because I hate fun. Whatever the reason, if I’m...| Posts on My place to put things
My place to put things| My place to put things
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 successful crim...| My place to put things