Establishing A Career Framework
A short guide on how to establish a career framework in your engineering organisation.
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Articles on software engineering, engineering management, and the outdoors by Jon Evans.
Latest posts
October 2025 Good Things
Better late than never on my October good things!
September 2025 Good Things
Some things that I've enjoyed or found interesting this month.
Website Refresh 2025
A detailed account of how I broke my website, then fixed it again, and maybe made it slightly better.
Book Review: In Ascension
A review of In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, as well as my own questions and theories about the plot.
Consulting Update - March 2023
A quarterly update on my software engineering and engineering management consulting business.
Consulting Update - December 2022
It’s been one month since I announced my consulting launch, so I thought I’d check in with an update on my progress so far.
Self-Development As An Engineering Leader: Gaining
A key factor in your ability to successfully grow an engineering team is your capacity for self-development. In this article, we’ll focus on the question: “What do I need to gain to continue to be a good leader as my organisation grows?”
I'm Launching A Consultancy
I'm starting to offer consulting services in engineering management and software development. Here are my goals.
Lockdown Walks Beyond Bristol
One of the few highlights of my 2020 was walking. Since I've lived in Bristol, I've wanted to make more of an effort to explore the beautiful local countryside.
Day 4: OAuth Flows
On Friday I finished off the initial implementation of obtaining an OAuth token from GitHub.
Day 2-3: Back to Django
The last couple of days have been relatively productive. Thanks to GitHub's excellent API documentation, I've got to the stage where I can reliably authenticate a user with my application via Oauth, and use their key to pull basic user info such as their private email address and GitHub ID.
Open Source Adventures, Day 1: Ideas and Skeletons
Today I began work on my project in earnest. It always helps me to visualize my goals if I can draw them out, and I still find pen and paper to be the best medium for rapidly exploring ideas.
Open Source Adventures, Day 0
Today is August 1st. Now that I have been back in Bristol for a little while, it's time to knuckle down on a project that I've been thinking about in some form or another for the last few months.
Quantifying Sufjan Stevens with the Genius API and NLTK
I am an avid Sufjan Stevens fan. I really enjoy his peaceful, somewhat melancholy style of music. As a person who is not religious myself, one of the things that I find interesting about his songs is that religious - specifically Christian - themes seem to appear quite broadly across his oeuvre.
Back in Bristol
It's been a long time since I've written anything on this blog, and I have a lot of ground to cover.
Making a Mockery of Python
Today we will be talking about mocking. No, not the joke at someone else's expense kind. Mocking is a technique to temporarily replace real parts of our code with fake, simpler parts, so that we can check that the rest of the parts are working as we intend.
Using Markdown with Django 1.7
Markdown is great. As a formatting language, I find it to be pretty much unparalleled for speed and ease of syntax. Not having to think overly hard about style allows you to focus purely on the quality of the content.