Weird month it's been 🥵

As I write this, I’m sat in the daytime coworking at the wonderful Gut Level in Sheffield. Why am I in Sheffield? Because today was the day of my first appointment with the NHS Gender Identity Clinic, after more than 5 years on the waiting list.

This is a huge thing (as any trans people in your life will tell you) and it went well but my head has been all over the place recently because of this and many other things.

This month has been all kinds of different things including a holiday (more on what that has to do with software engineering below) and - of course - the unmissable heatwaves. 🔥

But it’s also been a great week for progress on my new product Shufflehorse. I’m not ready for you to play with it yet but here’s a cryptic screenshot from the prototype so far (please ignore my design skills, or lack of!):

Want to know what the hell this is?

Next week - Tuesday 7th July - I’ll be speaking at Queer in Tech Leeds! If you’re a regular reader of my blog then the style will be very similar to my “Leadership tips” series but this is a new topic, titled “Fun is mandatory”.

Come along to hear me and two other amazing speakers and have a few (possibly free?) drinks with other queer and queer-friendly people in tech. I look forward to seeing you there!

And if you can’t make it, maybe this topic will become a blog post in its own right very very soon…

Sign up to attend on Meetup

In amongst everything else I’ve been able to bring you two new blog posts!

Sorry to ignite this “holy war”, but I hope I have a balanced and thoughtful take on this very polarising question: “Do I use AI at work?”

At the end of the post, I’ll link you to several great content creators talking about the nuances of AI, who I suspect will enter your regular rotation.

Does your engineering team suddenly go from being super-hyped about work to being deflated, slow and off sick all the time?

You might be experiencing what I refer to as “Morale waves”. In this blog post, I discuss why morale waves happen but, more importantly, what you can do to stop them happening!

Read more on the blog

Last week I took a solo holiday to Malta. It was absolutely incredible.

Malta in high season is really fascinating. Ostensibly there are tens of thousands of tourists crammed onto a tiny group of three islands, so you’d think it would be a complete sensory overwhelm.

But the reality is quite different. There are two broad kinds of tourists in Malta:

1. People who stay in the areas with the hotels and nightlife (or a cruise ship) and plan their holiday as it comes.

2. People who spend time planning ahead and go to see sights that are maybe further afield.

The first group are there to chill out and maybe see a few sights. The (tiny) capital city Valletta was absolutely packed with them. They are what most people think of when they think of a “Mediterranean holiday”.

The second group - which includes me - get to spend a week seeing an impregnable 16th century fortress, neoltithic temples 1000 years older than the pyramids, impossible geological features, Europe’s third largest dome, and - for some reason - a Subaru showroom that was abandoned with all the cars inside in the mid-1990s.

What was most jarring to me was that this second set of tourist attractions were by and large very quiet, with only a handful of tourists visiting each. I got to experience the second oldest standing building in the world almost by myself, in high season!

It got me thinking about software engineering too, and how current trends - perhaps driven by AI - are going back to the “suck it and see” mentality of writing lots of lines of code and solving problems quickly with minimal thought. But then there are dinosaurs like me who love to plan, design, write data schemas, and think really hard about convention-over-configuration and the DRY principle. The first group get instant satisfaction and maybe even an early payday, but the second group - who build things to last - get to admire the beauty of our work and revisiting old work is also a joy for us.

I don’t think one group is better than the other, but - like in Malta - I think it’s fascinating how few of us fall into the second group these days, when it was once all the rage!

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