I started to write this from a leadership perspective, but soon realised that this is a general principle that applies at all levels within an organisation. It’s a principle I’m going to call symmetrical professional behaviour. It works like this… whatever formal or informal contracts you use to interact with other people, it needs to […]
I had an interesting discussion with a very smart woman I know about tech. In particular, we talked about whether technology is inherently good, or bad. Our conclusion was that tech is only as bad as the non-tech analog for the activity you are engaging in. This is deep stuff, so let’s use some examples […]
There is an emerging theme of videos and articles aimed at millennials, telling them that they need to stay in jobs longer and learn “grit and perseverance”. This is the modern equivalent of the patronising change management book “Who Moved My Cheese”, which is handed out by lazy managers when they are performing radom acts […]
I thought I’d have a bit of fun applying Uncle Bob’s SOLID Principles to life. Obviously, this is a metaphor that could be stretched too far; but here are the principles of object-oriented living. If you aren’t familiar with these principles as applied to programming, you probably ought to start with Uncle Bob’s article linked […]
There used to be a trend in software creation where users would ask software developers to “add a type drop down to the auto date section”; and the developer would just do it. The result of this obedient style of software development did not result in a clean UI. The screenshot below can be found […]
I’m very excited about the Yashica Y35 digiFILM Camera, which successfully funded through Kickstarter today. My last film camera before switching to a Nikon D40 was a Yashica T4 that I was given by my great-uncle. I used that camera constantly to take random pictures of rusty fire-escapes, of decaying graffiti, and of bands I […]
How do you combat that paralysing feeling of paralysis you get when the problem is just too complex to tackle? The answer is quaductionism. I know what you’re thinking; you’re thinking that I just made this word up. That’s okay, because I did. But only because I needed a single word to sum up the […]
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 […]