Key Skills Leadership, Management, Cloud Architecture, Theory of Constraints, Software Architecture, OKRs, DORA Metrics Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, .NET, C# PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQL Server C, Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp API Gateway, CloudFormation, CloudFront, Cloudflare, EC2, ECR, ECS, Fargate, IAM, Lambda, Route53, S3 AI-Assisted Development, Agentic Coding, AI Safety Professional History…
Quick summary: because Meta (a.k.a. Facebook) has been loading malware onto Android devices in order to spy on users. In the past year I've (finally!) deleted my Facebook account, and have never used Instagram. The only remaining Meta product I've used has been Whatsapp, because it's being used by friends, family, and some of my kids' groups. I justified it because it'd be just too difficult to…
Salary sacrifice by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free . Some organisations that were perfectly content to embrace working from home during the pandemic are moving to mandated RTO (return to office). This is happening despite the fact that numerous studies show working from home increases productivity . So, what gives? Why would employers give up a significant uptick in productivity, along with…
Turned Off Laptop Computer', by Ken Tomita. Today I was writing an internal blog post for a client, and was struck by the fact that we in the IT industry have our terminology backwards when it comes to work. Years ago, my wife and I decided years ago to live in the Dandenong Ranges - initially Upwey, then Belgrave. It's a wonderful place to raise a family. Our eldest child (seven, nearly eight…
'Lemmings' by Sascha Kohlmann is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 . Recently, there's been a lot of focus in the news on people returning to the office in the Melbourne CBD. For example, from Melbourne CEOs push Andrews on office return : NAB chief executive Ross McEwan, Newcrest Mining CEO Sandeep Biswas and several top bosses are urging employees to return to the office as soon as safely possible, as…
After some deliberation, I've decided to use the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font for this site. The font itself is great. Clean, easy to read, and reasonably small at a couple of hundred KiB - and free to use courtesy its creator, the Braille Institute . The reason for my deliberation is that including the font significantly increases the size of this site upon first load - around doubling it. But I…
This is my new home on the Web, where I'll be blogging about aspects of my work and profession that I think will be of interest. Some topics I'm planning to cover in the future include: Doing more with less . With many companies right now looking to cut costs and avoid hiring, how can teams achieve more with fewer people and less money to spend on SaaS and cloud? Spoiler alert: building the right…