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 […]
Category: Opinion
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Yashica Y35 digiFILM Camera
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 […]
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Compare the Comparison Market 2017
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 […]
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Look Past Your Role
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, […]
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The Three Pillars of Conference Value
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 […]
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Election 2017 Boundaries
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 […]
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Tool Decision Approval Process
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 […]