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So, I occasionally share my car insurance comparison shenanigans and it’s renewal time once again. Compare the Market Once I logged in, it told me my renewal was coming up, and had automatically incremented things like “number of years you have held your license” and “number of years no claims bonus”. This was a graceful […]
I get annoyed by articles that generalise by role or job title. The inane “developers are better than programmers”, or “software engineers vs software developers”, or even “software developers can’t lead your test automation efforts”. The reason I dislike such rubbish is I work with people. When you work with people, and recognise the humanity, […]
The development of your career is, of course, entirely up to you. You need to go out and learn things that are valuable in the marketplace whatever you intend to do in the next few years. The alternative is to give up learning and rust away to nothing. From the perspective of an organisation, there […]
When your body detects an infection, it will kick off an immune response that fights the infection with white blood cells (macrophages). If this doesn’t solve the problem, your body upgrades the response to white blood cells called T and B lymphocytes. Interestingly, there are two jobs undertaken by these two kinds of white blood […]
I don’t “do politics” and I apologise that this is political – but not in the sense that I am interested in promoting the interests of any particular political party. I just want to highlight the flavour of democracy in the UK. Did you ever wonder how important the boundaries are in a general election […]
One of the most famous tales in Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman must be the story of the Cargo Cult. The story concerns a group of people who, due to a war, had an airbase planted nearby. They saw all of the airplanes arriving with lots of amazing stuff on board, so when the airbase […]
Choosing tools and technology can be a formal process that locks you into your choices, or a chaotic process where nobody knows what the choices are. The correct way to document a decision is to supply just enough information to explain why the choice was made at this point in time, what alternatives were considered, […]
When you have a tough design choice to make, it is common for the ideas to be bounced around within an informal committee. This causes a premature convergent stage in the design, where each committee member adds to the shopping list of requirements, or to the banned list of what cannot be done. Good user […]
Frameworks and toolkits are great, because you get to do something complex in a very simple way – and that saves time. I use them – a lot. But I also understand the cost. Let’s approach it from the stock answer everyone gets when they say “I’m trying to write something that does x but […]
You may recognise the scenario. A team that seems lethargic, low-energy, lacking communication, and delivering poor quality work can suddenly ignite into a high-energy team of awesomeness… all they need is for the boss to be on holiday, or at a conference, or in an off-site meetings – just generally not around. This is the […]