Kieran Potts

Kieran Potts is a software developer and former technology journalist. His blog is a commentary on methods and tools for developing and maintaining software systems.

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Latest posts

Reverse interviews

An interview is a two-way process. Here is the set of "reverse interview" questions I use to assess the real quality of a software job — the red and green flags that reveal what a place is actually like to work at.

Jun 24, 2026

The Mythical Man-Month at 50

Fred Brooks's classic book The Mythical Man-Month was published 50 years ago. It was hugely influential on the then-nascent discipline of software development. How does it stand up today?

Dec 28, 2025

The (software) quality without a name

The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander is a classic text on real-world architecture. In computing, it was influential in the emerging field of object-oriented programming in the late 1970s and 1980s. The book still has much to teach us about how we think about software design.

Oct 5, 2025

PHP is 30

PHP version 1.0 was announced on 8 June 1995. It quickly became a popular server-side scripting language for websites. Here's why.

Jun 8, 2025

Mental models: essential versus accidental complexity

A mental model for thinking about the relative importance of essential and accidental complexity.

Dec 7, 2024

30 years of cybercafés

Cyberia, thought to be the world's first commercially successful internet café, opened in London on 1 September 1994.

Sep 1, 2024

Requests for comments

Requests for Comments (RFCs) are strikingly underused in commercial software delivery. Here's why you should encourage your team to take up this mighty tool.

Apr 10, 2024