Mastering Visual Communication
...for Software Architecture. Jacqui Read on how to effectively communicate architectural designs in the best way, to the right audience and in the right...
invalid argument: a blog by d.j. graham - Blog Feed
a triumph of style over substance
Latest posts
Excellent Websites
Andy Bell on his design approach to developing websites and the underlying cube css...
Agressive Dates
A nice presentation from Clarke Ching on the thirteen things it takes to handle projects so that they can deliver...
Go
No such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as down time. All you got is life time....
Guerilla Programming
Hadrien Mens-Pellen discussing guerilla programming - survive in hostile tech environments - from the NewCrafts 2025...
Git From The Inside Out
This is me collecting some of the better git explainer presentations for my colleagues. Here Mary Rose Cook walks through the specific internals of git and what the graph looks...
Fix My PR
Or "How to Update a Feature Branch From main and Still End Up With a Single Commit PR". If your repository expects exactly one commit in each pull request, you need to be a bit careful when...
Dare Not
"I remember. Yes. I recall the Sipperley case. He couldn't bring himself to the scratch. A marked coldness of the feet, was there not? I recollect you saying he was letting - what was it? -...
Double Business
Like a man to double business bound I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both...
Photo Consolidation
Like a lot of people who have been messing about with computers and technology for a long time, I have a few old hard drives lying around acting as backups from previous, now defunct machines. As they...
Grief
She heard him mutter, "Can you take away this grief?" "I'm sorry," she replied. "Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and...
Check Azure Resources
Recently I was making some changes to build scripts following a template but with a high possibility that there could be typos creeping in as the work got more and more repetitive. I wrote a script in...
Community
I often think one of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies over and over that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex whose superpower is the...
Trigger Github Workflow
Normally running a github workflow happens either automatically as a result of a commit or PR merge or as a manual invokation if dispatch is configured for that workflow. Here I needed to kick off a...
Doubts
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to...
Murmuration
This is an adaptation of the Flocking example code from p5js and based on the earlier work of Craig Reynolds Boids. Edge Avoidance First thing to change was removing the screen wrapping behaviour...
Microbit Mesh Network
Here is a demonstration of a mesh network implemented by several microbits working together to deliver a message from one destination unit to an intended target unit. Every microbit in the network is...
Power
Neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without...
Tiny C Tokenizer
I had an idea for a p5js project but it requires a way to make sense of some early version of C code. Specifically K&R style C code from way back in the dawn of time. For this project, I only need...
Fun for Now
Kevlin Henney's keynote about fun in development and making the journey of developing software more...
Vibe Refactor
What would it look like to have some existing code randomly changed ("refactored") by an "AI" in vibe coding mode? Here we are running a simple finite state machine that goes...
Leash
People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash...
Machinery
...There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in the...
Hustle Culture
Source /* eslint-disable */ function setup() { createCanvas(windowWidth, windowHeight).parent("hustle"); textSize(100); textAlign(CENTER, CENTER); textFont('Arial'); textStyle(BOLD); } let frame = 1;...
Redacted
A small sketch related to current events, available at Open Processing here. Source /* eslint-disable */ const corpus = `When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to...
Brick
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they...
Download from RSS
I have a few podcasts that I listen to regularly and some I particularly want to archive away the earlier episodes in case they ever disappear from online due to disaster or simply the person closes...
Past Present and Future
Optimism
You must realize that I am far from feeling beaten…it seems to me that… a man out to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself — his very energy and will, the iron...
In Praise of Ordinary People
Mike Monteiro, of Meeting Tokens fame, on changing the world - by...
Hourglass
Here's a small project to model a simple hourglass timer that animates "sand" pixels falling from the top, through the middle and filling up the bottom of the screen. This is a great...
Ghost Detector 3
I had some feedback from trainers that the new improved ghost detector from last year was overly complicated and relied too much on the class construct which their students weren't working with, so...
Tiny Turtle
Here is an experiment in making a tiny implementation of the Logo Programming Language adapted for the microbit and the audience I was working with for some training. As with all logo implementations,...
Microbit Spying
Reading about something entirely unrelated today I stumbled on a wikipedia article about Numbers Stations, a radio broadcast of seemingly random numbers that were believed to be used to communicate...
Create a Service Now Incident
A short sketch here to create an incident in Service Now. This uses the Table API to create an incident, passing a data object that includes the description and a priority. Code The code uses the...
Sky
You are the sky. Everything else - it's just the...
Creative History
If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if...
Residuality Theory
Barry O'Reilly on structured software and the Pulsating Ball of...
The Laughing Heart
your life is your life don't let it be clubbed into dank submission be on the watch there are ways out. there is a light somewhere it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch....
Simple Simon Game
I haven't posted a game in a while so here's a very simple recreation of the "Simon" game which uses the two buttons on the front of the microbit and the touch logo but could be broken out...
The Only Things
The only things stopping me today are: genetics, lack of will, income, brain chemistry and external...
Wilhoit's Law
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not...
Microbit Canvas
Following on from my 11ty shortcode to generate a simplified microbit ui as an SVG image, I wanted to explore making something similar but using the canvas API in the browser. I adapted the original...
Mini Lisp
This is probably something I should have attempted many years ago when I was first introduced to "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Abelson and Sussman and the recorded...
Failure to Communicate
The always wonderful Woody Zuill with a terrifying presentation on communication, Wiio's Laws and what we maybe can do about...
Finding Duplicates
I have several spare hard drives which contain multiple back up copies of the same files - pdfs, photos, etc. - in different nested folders. I wanted to write a python script I can run to find which...
Decorators
Reuven Lerner explains how decorators work in...
Blinking Again
I freely admit a lot of my understanding and use of Python has been on a self-taught and need-to-know basis but one function in the docs interested me and mentioned something I wasn't aware was a...