Blog
A photo of my Japanese weekly notes Social media companies advertise themselves with a heavy emphasis on the “social” side. They show people having the most hilarious of times with friends, outside, enjoying parties, festivals, and generally having...
Illustration by Heather Barron I spend a lot of my time pair programming. I like that the feedback is immediate, I learn a lot, and, maybe most importantly, I have a good laugh with the person I’m working with. I’ll spend no time here convincing...
Illustration by Fiona Stabler Engineering teams can have any number of processes. They have those rituals like stand-ups, retrospectives, planning meetings, and sometimes there are specific steps for raising a bug or fixing one. If I’m being honest...
I have conflicting feelings about New Year’s resolutions. On one hand, it’s nice to reflect on the year that has passed and to think about the changes you’d like to make. On the other hand, it’s very cold and dark outside (up here in the northern...
My wife asked me if we should watch a movie called The Menu recently, and I Googled “Should I watch The Menu?”. After we watched it she asked me what I thought, and I Googled “The Menu reviews”. She laughed and said “I’m not asking Google, I’m asking...
Are you an honest person? Be honest. I think most people would automatically answer yes. Not being honest is a bad thing. To lie is to deceive somebody intentionally and that’s not us. No, you must be thinking of somebody else. The reality is that...
If you work in tech you’ll likely have to deal with complexity. Ageing codebases, new technologies, scaling up, every step of the way seems to involve wrangling complexity. It’s one thing to get your head around something tricky, but it’s something...
Last week I performed a Denial of Service attack against my Raspberry Pi. I used something called a SYN flood attack because it’s a really simple and fun way to learn about TCP. Before we go any further I need to just point out that you can get...
2022 marks the year I will have been in the tech industry for 10(!) years. There have been a lot of changes in that time, both in my life and the tech world, and now feels like an appropriate time to share my thoughts on the past, present, and future...
What makes an effective engineer? It’s common to hear an answer that prioritises technical competency. While this is understandable, I think it’s damaging to our industry and the humans that occupy its space. There’s an unfortunate stereotype that...
I had a JavaScript class that I wanted to make use of in my Rails view. Sounded like a 5 minute job, but I spent a lot of time figuring out what the right approach is. Here’s what I ended up with and you can tell me if it’s a good or bad idea. Users...