Musical Goals (2026)
It's been more than five years since my last musical goals post, where I set some process-oriented goals, in addition to my longer-term outcome-oriented ones. I share my journey, progress on the old goals, and set some new ones.
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The YAML Exponent Problem causing chaos in your config files
It is well known that YAML has a Norway problem, where the country code NO is interpreted as boolean false . But did you know about YAML's related implicit conversion of numbers footgun?
Alien Artefacts
The purpose of this blog post is to introduce the concept of alien artefacts , a subcategory of legacy code that is highly resistant to change despite being well-designed and performing a critical function. It provides insights into the challenges engineers face when dealing with such code and offers practical advice on how to effectively maintain it.
Levelling up Pull Requests
I share how I tackled the challenge of reducing cycle time for getting pull requests approved within my team, using the first habit from "7 Habits of Highly Effective People": Be Proactive .
Can I Crack the Code?
I've played guitar for 25 years, but I'm unable to play fast. Can Troy Grady's Cracking The Code change that?
Personal Retrospectives
Introducing a Guide to Personal Retrospectives ---a post on our company blog I co-wrote with my colleague Cian.
The Scout Mindset
I review the book by Julia Galef---about the motivation to see things as they are , not as you wish they were .
Polite notice
From now on there will be only abstracts in the RSS feed. Sorry. Update: I've tried to assign a permalink, despite the RSS-only announcement, in the hope this post won't show up as a new item every time I update the site.
Shell Quickstart
In 2013 I worked at NET-A-PORTER, where we ran a year-long graduate program. Participants did three-month rotations with four teams, getting experience with different parts of our business. I volunteered to run a workshop introducing them to shell programming, and later adapted the material into this blog post 1 . This is the Unix philosophy: write programs that do one thing, and do it well. Write…
How I record Guitar
In my musical journey I try to record myself occasionally to track my progress, and be able to critically listen to myself so I can fix my mistakes. This is brief note on how I normally do that. I plug the guitar into a Yamaha THR-10 amp, which has an USB output. By installing the Yamaha Steinberg USB Driver , I can connect the THR10 to my computer and use it as an input interface for Garageband.…
On broken horses & master branches
Every time I start learning to ride I get disillusioned and give up due to two things; the cost, and the terminology . Referring to a horse as broken 2 is still common, and it troubles me. My own field has its own problematic terminology . I've been uncomfortable using master as the default branch in my Git repositories for a while. Yet, I've continued to use it in part due to inertia, and part…