Engineering from the glorious Kingdom
Sabbaticals are about transition, and preparing to make the stage beyond the transition successful. They're also about taking a step back, and seeing if what you're doing makes sense. They give opportunities to recover, to learn, to try new things and think deeply about where next. So what have I been working on? Blog I rebuilt my WordPress blog from the ground-up, to a Jamstack site; one that…
Code being written instantaneously by AI makes expertise in the craft of software engineering more valuable, not less. What a good software engineer looks like will have many subjective answers depending on who you ask. Some might want a driven finisher, some might want a meticulous bug fixer. But those aren't skills of a software engineer so much as personality traits; important ones to balance…
I've worked at two scale-ups over the last 12 years, and after two exits, I'm taking a break to work out what I want to do next. I have a list of projects that sound interesting to me, but mostly I'm staying curious and not being prescriptive about the path to take for a while. One of these impromptu projects led to me speedrunning a failed business in two weeks. In the summer of 2013 I completed…
I've finished rewriting my 15 year WordPress blog from the ground up as a static Next.js site. This was attempt number three, and I'm ~happy~ relieved to say this one was successful. Early in my career, my default was to over-engineer. When I started a blog in 2011, I wanted to own the entire stack myself, and despite knowing nothing about CMS tech, I wanted the most configurable solution…
I realised I had gained a reputation for recommending books when it became a joke on Slack. I'm not even particularly well read, but there are some foundational concepts in teamwork, management, leadership, and tech, that come up time and time again. Sometimes the key lesson only takes a sentence to explain, but a book will reinforce the idea much more strongly. Here are the most impactful books I…
Generative AI tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Roo Code, Windsurf have fundamentally changed the process of how software is written. As teams increasingly rely on AI-generated code, they need to rethink how they merge this code into their codebase, especially regarding comments. I’ve long taken a policy against most comments when writing code. It has been perfectly summed up by this…
Over twenty years in software development, I’ve witnessed an evolution in how code integrates with other code. Each step has enabled more complex and distributed systems capable of progressively more impressive achievements. This comes with the price of understanding each new layer’s abstraction, moving us further from fast, direct execution and closer to slow, human communication. This journey…
In software deployment, there exists a fundamental tension between three critical factors: speed, safety, and automation. This forms a triangle where engineering teams can optimise for any two points, but something must give on the third. You can deploy fast and safely, but only with significant automation investment. You can deploy fast with minimal automation, but safety suffers. Or you can…
5 Whys is a prevalent engineering process in a modern tech company. When your company has operational incidents (and even the biggest and best ones do), 5 Whys is there to find the root cause, which in turn yields the next steps to make sure those incidents don’t happen again. I could tell the engineering culture of the company needed work when an internal team had an outage related to an expired…
To convince someone, tell them why, then how, then what, in that order. To give an instruction, tell someone what, and time permitting, consider sharing the how, and why, in a reverse of the previous sequence. Simon Sinek’s insightful Start With Why TED Talk took about 15 minutes to change how I would give all presentations forever after. Intrisically it’s known that you have to share the…
“This team isn’t delivering enough.” You’ve had a fully funded team of engineers working on a product for years. It has fundamental issues with quality and completeness, and still isn’t integrated with the core platform seamlessly. As time has gone on, you’re getting further behind, not closer. There is either a problem with execution against the strategy, or with the strategy itself. You reflect.…
If you gave two options to someone who cared about business outcomes, about what they could have, which do you think they’d choose? new product feature or reduce technical debt fix a bug or reduce technical debt improved sales channel or reduce technical debt more accessible UI or reduce technical debt increased performance or reduce technical debt Technical debt, or more simply tech debt, is the…
Perform an activity frequently enough, and you will start to see patterns. After being involved in the process of creating software for two decades, I’ve decided to curate a living document of the high level patterns which are most applicable for how to build and maintain software well. These are my engineering culture values, what are yours? 01. Tradeoff Everything is a tradeoff. When you make a…
I'm currently trying to hire as many software engineers as I can, and more and more I'm seeing applications from candidates who retrained via an intense, engineering bootcamp. I want to hire every single one of them. In general whenever I'm interviewing someone I want them to succeed regardless, but there's a lack of diversity of thought in tech and when I see someone with a background in…
It has been a while since I wrote my first manager README. The idea is simple: help people who are going to be reporting to you understand the way you think, what you believe, and what you expect. For this one, I'm going to write it without looking at my previous attempt to see how my worldview has changed in the intervening three years. Team The primary responsibility of an engineering manager is…
This is perhaps only my second, and hopefully final, time where I play futurist. I'm going to argue that memes are the future of corporate values. You know, those pithy, untruthful, and ignored statements that the senior leadership of your company claim defines their identity and culture. I want to replace them with the inane nonsense that you see across imgur, 9-gag, and icanhascheezburger. I'll…
Thank you for joining me on this journey of learning the how and why of becoming fit, specifically concentrating on strength training. We learned that strength training is the basis for life-long fitness that will amplify your other fitness pursuits beyond strength. Fitness brings improved health, resilience, and confidence in yourself. It will reward you as you grow older by making your life…
The introduction to why getting strong is hard began with the idea that the beginning of the journey toward strength is easy. No matter what you do, you will almost certainly get good results, which leads to internalising incorrect conclusions. You only get to be a novice once. By the time you become an intermediate lifter you will experience many occasions where the rule determining your…
A tree touches the world with its leaves and ever-burrowing roots, the edges of this complex organism supported and fueled by the tree trunk. Likewise the blood and central nervous system reaching the tips of your fingers and toes are connected all the way through to the heart and brain. Strength begins in the core of the body. There's a strange body ideal for men to have big arms and ripped abs,…
You don't just walk up to the biggest weight you've ever seen in your life and try to pick it up. Your body must be prepared for the stress. Mostly, this will come down to the body being warm, and muscles forewarned a little. Preparation on the day is also intrinsically tied to your body's flexibility; are you actually even supple enough to perform the lift you want to? Muscles can stretch and…
I remember watching a comedy lifting video on YouTube that had a line in it like, "No one likes 'Leg Day'. 'Leg Day' is tough. Your last 'Leg Day' also happened to be your first 'Leg Day'." For those not yet well versed enough in the lifting sub-culture to get the joke, a lot of people who lift don't like squats, so don't do squats. They'll do some exercises every now and again to make sure their…
Moving from aerobic based exercises to anaerobic means not only changing the exercises themselves, but also how you approach and rest between exercises. The clue is in the etymology of the word: aerobic means 'with air'. Anaerobic exercises i.e. strength building weight lifting, conversely means 'without air'. You are asking the body to move things after you've expended all the oxygen your blood…
There is no new lesson in this chapter, merely a reiteration of two previously made points. In the beginning your body will still progress even if you lift incorrectly. Some lifters in your gym will likely be using poor technique. This lesson cannot be stressed enough: good technique is of the most paramount importance. As we've just covered, lifts should be done with good form which means finding…
The key to strength is in making compound lifts the basis of your training routine. Let's break the term down. A lift is a strength exercise where you move a heavy weight from a stationary position to an elevated position, and back again. A compound lift is one which incorporates multiple different movements. For example, a classic example of a simple lift is a bicep curl: a dumbbell is held in…
I remember growing up when I had some small dumbbells around the house. They might have been 5kg or even 10kg dumbbells, the memory is hazy. I think they were originally my mum's. I went to boxing training for a few weeks at university, and as part of a college football squad I had a routine of some body weight exercises: press ups, sit ups, planks etc. From all that I thought I knew some good…
Before you take a single decision in how you're going to train for becoming strong, you need to understand the difference between free weights and fixed resistance machines. And you need to run a mile away from the latter. You've likely never heard of Arthur Jones) but you will be aware of the effect he's had on the fitness industry. Walk into any gym in any town or city and you will expect to see…
Choosing to concentrate on strength training is a solid decision. But it's a hard one because for most people it's not like anything they've done before. Even for those familiar with press-ups (body weight exercises) or dumbbell curls, you have to open your mind to many new lessons, and unlearn or defend against incorrect ways of exercising. These next few posts will highlight traps it's easy to…
The food that you eat, which fuels your exercise and aids your recovery, is every bit as important as the training routine you execute. As well as being just as important, the subject is just as big. The advice I give on food, however, will be limited just to this single post. Eat 1-2 grams of protein per kilogram of weight per day when strength training. Some say 1g per kg, some say 1g per lb…
Having learned about the different fitness types, and about to make a change for life, you may have ideas about the type of body or changes you want to make. Perhaps a large part of your exercise routine will include long walks, or gentle jogs. Maybe it could include a ten minute punishing routine on a bike or rowing machine in the gym. I'm going to ask you to reconsider that choice before…
We’ve already talked about how training is stress that the body can recover from. In order to make the gain from each session as impactful as possible, you need to prepare well. Preparation helps fuel your workout, and equally important, preparation for the next workout in the form of recovery also needs to be understood and practiced well. Food As far as workouts are concerned, food is fuel.…
Conventional wisdom says that getting fit is losing fat. Losing fat requires more exercise, and fewer calories. What you’ve just learned in the previous posts though, is that fitness is more complex than just your weight on the scales. There are many other measures of fitness and achieving progress in some avenues may require not eating less, but instead eating more. To explain a situation where…
Up to now you may have thought of fitness or looking good as simply losing weight. Or more specifically, losing fat. Everyone knows if you want to lose fat, the key to doing so is down to diet and exercise. Fat is one of the two important energy storage supplies that the body has access to, and by limiting the amount of food you eat, you give the body less raw material to turn into fat; likewise,…
Fitness means different things to different people. Fitness means different things to different sports. The physical capabilities of humans are breathtaking in terms of the kind of achievements that are possible. For running, humans have completed 100m in under 10 seconds, one mile in under 4 minutes, a marathon in under 2 hours. Polar explorers, mountaineers, free divers etc. survive inspite of…
You set yourself a fitness goal. This isn't the first time, you've set many in the past. Some of which you've made, some you're embarrassed to repeat because of how you never really got started. But you're going to go again, and in your head, you have an idea about what you could be capable of achieving; what you think will make you happy to say, "I reached that goal!" Regardless of what the goal…
Up to now I've asked you to consider the reason for getting fit on the pure physical benefits: the increased ability to be active for longer, the energy and endorphins you will have in store to attack your daily tasks and projects. The way you might look and how others will judge you is not something I've detailed here, but all of us can be chest beating gorillas or displaying peacocks at times.…
Anthony Bourdain has summed up the key problem of motivation in a single, relatable quote: > "I understand there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy." Motivation is a hard problem and everyone brings a different tool to the party. Some tell their friends about their…
Stress has a negative image. It's generally seen as a bad thing and something to be avoided, but stress is how we improve. The first time we try something completely new, we cannot expect to be good or even competent, yet that act of starting is the first step toward becoming an expert. The two key decisions to consider are what level you start at and the pace of your progression. Starting…
Exercise is running round the block for five minutes. Training is structured exercise that is done deliberately, in a structured manner as part of a wider schedule to achieve a specific goal. Don't trust the result of exercise - it's unpredictable and unreliable. By contrast, training is something you can count on. What training is not, is a hired PT shouting at you, "C'mon just 5 more, 4... 3...…
It's very easy to begin something with the best of intentions and say things like, "Every little helps." or "It can't do any harm." without knowing if your efforts are having any effect whatsoever. Everyone is different and wants different things from fitness (we'll cover the types of fitness in detail later) but one thing is constant throughout your new journey. If you don't measure the right…
If you're still reading I've hopefully convinced you, or at least you're open to the idea, of learning higher level concepts before making permanent lifestyle changes to become fitter. And you're happy to listen to my ideas of what those concepts and lessons should be. Thanks. I'm flattered. More likely though is that you remain curious and yet to be convinced. That's perfect, and that's exactly…
Before going any further with the mystic change-for-life-fitness plan I'm proposing, we need to calibrate ourselves on a couple of points to avoid the disappointment of mismatched expectations. When I say that personal trainers, badly equipped gyms, shaming magazines, and processed diet foods have different goals to you; that they're out to keep you dependent on them rather than enabling you to…
Banks will often advertise promotions offering sizeable sums of money for opening an account. There are all sorts of conditions like, a minimum amount of money to be deposited each month, and keeping the account open for a certain number of months. How is this profitable though? It's profitable because changing banks is something that most of us never do. This isn't the only activity seldom…
This is the first in a long series of posts about fitness. By the end you will be better prepared than ever before to attack your personal path to fitness. But before we begin, let's tackle the elephant in the room: why the hell are you taking fitness tips, from a middle-aged, technology office worker!? In 2019 the fitness industry is worth approximately $87.2 billion. More people are interested…
The concept of a manager README doc, as an introduction of what to expect from a new manager, has become popular in technical circles because it's what we use to introduce our software projects. For the first time in nearly five years, I'm changing company and this feels like the perfect way to let my new colleagues understand my core beliefs. n00b If I'm new to the team or company, I'm the…
You're unlikely to read a job spec these days that doesn't contain the word, Agile (capitalised, of course), scrum, kanban, or possibly the acronym TDD. It's comforting for developers to know that they won't be expected to work under the Waterfall software development process; that they're not writing legacy code from scratch without a build pipeline of hierarchical automated tests; or worse…
In my day job we use Slack as a key communication tool - for those who haven't used it, it's basically a corporate version of IRC with good UX. In a private channel for those in leadership positions, there was a question about how to transition from Software Engineer to Engineering Manager; what to consider when moving from a predominantly individual contributor (IC) specialisation to a team…
A thought experiment occurred to me which looks to answer the question, "Are you happy?" In a science fiction film I saw recently there was a fantastical machine that copies (clones) whatever thing or person is placed inside it. Without ever explicitly going through the detail of the pros and cons of the situation, the people who use the machine to clone themselves do so at great risk to their…
During the #firstsevenjobs trend on Twitter, I tweeted my rather standard career path into software. It piqued the curiosity of a friend and former colleague who was interested in my minor blip as a data scientist - it was a surprising and short six month period in my career and fairly recent. Here's my story about why, and how I became a data scientist, and more importantly, some lessons on why…
When it comes to dependencies, there are two extremes in software development. Complete ownership of everything right down to the abstract data types e.g. "Yes I write my own open addressing hash table and hash map"; or on the other hand grabbing strangers' code left, right and centre e.g. "I'd rather have a dependency on some random, 12 line implementation of LeftPad because that's one less thing…
Again and again, I find web development one of the most fascinating of all the disciplines I've come across in my career. Fascinating in the way Extreme Ironing is fascinating: you spend as much of the time wondering why as you do how. Getting started The main issue as I see it for a developer with existing skills in programming looking to become a web developer, is how to get started. Take…