Software engineer, photographer and maker of things.
Quick housekeeping before we dive in. I've started a Substack dedicated to fatherhood writing. This piece is cross-posted there. If that's your kind of thing, check it out . Six months is an interesting moment. It is the penultimate milestone that feels truly meaningful to talk about: after a year, they are toddlers, small children that develop and grow in a completely different way. More than…
Quick housekeeping before we dive in. I've started a Substack dedicated to fatherhood writing. This piece is cross-posted there. If that's your kind of thing, check it out . Twelve weeks. An arbitrary number for non-parents but for those with young children it is touted as an important milestone; when things become a little more sane, when you begin to adjust to your new life. It has only been 34…
Quick housekeeping before we dive in. I've started a Substack dedicated to fatherhood writing. This piece is cross-posted there. If that's your kind of thing, check it out . Nobody tells you that the best parts of Fatherhood are often the smallest. Everyone talks about the big stuff: the first steps, the first words, the overwhelming love that hits you in ways you couldn’t have imagined before it…
Quick housekeeping before we dive in. I've started a Substack dedicated to fatherhood writing. This piece is cross-posted there. If that's your kind of thing, check it out . We are all busy. Busy with work, busy with life. I thought I was busy too, until the twins arrived. It turns out I wasn’t busy at all, I was living a life of time excess. I had time to do everything and then time to choose to…
Quick housekeeping before we dive in. I've started a Substack dedicated to fatherhood writing. This piece is cross-posted there. If that's your kind of thing, check it out . Fifty days ago, our little family of three became a not-so-little family of five. Arthur and Evelyn arrived a little early, perfectly happy and healthy. Twins. Three under three. Three under two and a half, actually. Two…
For the uninitiated, I am taking on a series of 21-day experiments. A brief introduction can be found here . We all know what is going to happen, right? Sugar, in the modern sense, is probably bad. Very bad. It's in everything and we can't stop eating it. Here in the UK, we are eating three times the recommended amount of sugar [1] and that is taking into account what appears to be a fairly…
I like experiments: time-boxed, specific and purposeful. Over the years I've tried all kinds: setting and tracking monthly goals, fasting, reading 100 books in a year and a few more unsuitable for public announcement. I was recently reading a post by David Cain that inspired me to pick up some self-experimentation once again. I had also, by sheer coincidence, stumbled across an article by Tim…
I am holding myself accounting throughout July. You can read how and why here . If you are reading this, either July has not yet finished or I failed miserably. Update A success. Mostly . No sugar, no bad food ✅ No fizzy drinks ✅ No alcohol ❌ No mindless doomscrolling ❌ No days without physical exercise ✅ I haven't had any sugar or sweetener in a month. I'm about 9lbs/4kg down which was never the…
I dislike excuses. This isn’t one. In the midst of early parenthood, career development and other major life changes I have let too much slip. In the iconic words of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver: I gotta get in shape now. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on it’ll be 50 push ups each morning. 50 pull ups. No more pills. No more…
The highest degree of Freemasonry. The international dialing code for France. The number of Vedic Gods. The age at which Jesus died. The number of vertebrae in the human spine. The atomic number for Arsenic. The number of Chilean miners trapped underground in 2010. Thirty three. One more year gone. Another one ahead. Buy a house. Run a marathon. Journal every day. Write and publish more. Build…
Last year was a profound journey of contrasts for me, marked by the loss of my father and the arrival of my first child, all within the span of seven months. These events have reshaped my understanding of life, work, and the delicate balance we all strive to maintain between personal fulfilment and professional ambition. The passing of my father was a deep loss that reverberated through the core…
Once or twice a month I get an email from a current or recent student of a coding bootcamp asking for advice and insight about breaking into the industry. More often than not this comes in the form of a video call though occasionally some kind of synchronous chat via LinkedIn. I recently spoke to two people back to back and unsurprisingly my advice and feedback was almost identical to both, which…
It isn't a controversial statement to say that reading is one of the most important pastimes somebody can take up. You begin, however, to head into murky waters when you dictate what should be read or what is objectively good or bad. I recently came to the realisation that I love reading but flit from book to book; like a moth to a flame I eagerly follow the zeitgeist or the most recent…
Next time you are in a conversation with somebody who is not a close friend or family member, try to discern if you are talking or speaking. Talking is engaging in the art of conversation. Talking involves give-and-take. Whilst there is no requirement for the output to be split perfectly between participants, each party has ample opportunity to both speak and listen. Speaking, on the other hand,…
At the end of 2021 I decided to abandon the traditional New Year’s Resolutions in favour of setting goals month by month . I decided on four themes that would serve as threads holding the goals together throughout the year. 2022 From a simple data perspective it went as follows: I set goals 10 out of 12 months I set 41 individual goals 21 goals were successful (52%) Not great. I’ve been pondering…
A disclaimer: the following thoughts are certainly not intended as advice nor are they necessarily reflective of other companies of similar size. I have verified with other developers that many of these thoughts are commonly held but regardless everything should be taken as purely subjective. My previous role was at a fairly small start-up: a three man engineering team, lots of creative control…
Taking career advice from anybody is a risky and inadvisable endeavour. Especially from professional career advisers. Nobody can tell you what to do and even if they did, you probably wouldn’t listen. That being said, in the past three years I have fast tracked a career change, career progression and long term opportunities at a ferocious pace. Along the way I’ve picked up knowledge and ideas that…
My alarm rings at 6am. I snooze it and spend the next ten minutes scrolling through Twitter. I reach a tweet that I remember from late last night so switch to Instagram. I watch a few stories and scroll the algorithmically determined feed. I check three online news sources of varying political leanings and take in what has gone on in the world whilst I've slept. I check my personal and work…
I am skeptical of New Year's Resolutions. I am unsure if that is because I have always struggled to meaningfully stick to any goals or because there is an inherent issue with the concept. A year is a long time and most resolutions are thought of quickly and haphazardly sometime between Christmas and New Year. The goal setting is rushed and the actual goals themselves lack a reasonably executable…
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal is a truly wonderful piece of writing. The simple dust jacket description would go something like "it tells the story of Hanta, an elderly man who works as a paper crusher. He uses the time on his job to read, preserve and pay tribute to classic, rare and banned books of Literature, Philosophy and Art." It is only 112 pages long and I would encourage anybody…
Whether you're starting a business, launching a product, trying to get rich, getting fit, wanting to self-improve, developing a side hustle or just merely existing, there are some books that are recommended at every turn. Books that 'everyone must read', essential' and 'life-changing'. They have become so commonplace in recommendations that I have developed a sort of learned blindness; whenever I…
How many built in Array methods can you name? Off the top of my head I came up with: map, filter, reduce, find, pop, push, shift, unshift, forEach, concat and includes. At time of writing, there are at least 32 , I named less than a third! The beauty of programming is that we are problem solving. We take our tool kit, which may contain less than a third of the tools available, and use what we have…