Think Big
A week ago I started building my PIM and I have a status update to share: In a little over a week, working a little in evenings, but mostly on weekends I have a pretty functional PIM. In this age of vibe coding, this might seem a little slow, however this was built to be … Continue reading PIM Progress
I’ve decided to build my own personal finance manager. I don’t usually have a personal itch worth scratching, but AI coding tools have made building things so much cheaper that motivation, not skill, is now the real bottleneck. This time I have one. The gap I used MoneyBrilliant for years until it was sold to … Continue reading I’m Building My Own PIM
The way code is written is being fundamentally changed by LLMs. This is a freight train that you cannot stop. To quote someone else: If you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road. I’ve been working in software for close to 30 years. In that time, I’ve written code in: Fortran, C, … Continue reading LLMs (AI) are changing the way code is written
10 months into 2021 we’ve had 10 minutes of downtime of the core platform we manage at work (Bench). This works out at 99.9977% uptime (or 4 nines of uptime). I’m really proud of this. Although I’m a bit disappointed that that we didn’t get as far as 5 nines of uptime (99.999%) (which we … Continue reading Towards 100% uptime
I’m excited to announce something I’ve been working on for a little while: Changed.Page. This is a platform that notifies you when web pages change. Every day this checks pages to see if they’ve changed and send you an email if they have. It’s that simple. I’ve been using this myself for a little while, … Continue reading Introducing Changed.Page
Many times in your career or your personal life you’ll face difficult decisions. When you face a decision where the consequences of making the wrong decision are serious. You feel sick in your stomach as you think about even making the decision. So how do you make the decision? The first thing to acknowledge that … Continue reading Difficult Decisions
Over time, I’ve developed some pretty strong views on what skills are most useful in technology. I’ve developed these from 20 years of experience in different roles from hands on development, staff management and strategic leadership positions. Without a doubt, the two most important skills are: The ability to learn Communication These two skills are … Continue reading Most useful skills in…
Over my career I’ve worked with a number of remote teams in different contexts. From this I’ve collected a few lessons I’ve learnt. Like the best lessons, some of these have been learnt the hard way. The TLDR version is: working with remote teams is similar to working with any development team, with some additional … Continue reading Working with Remote Development Teams
During a quiet time over the Christmas break, I spent a little time looking for a better way to manage patching EC2 instances on AWS. It took a little while to put it all together so I thought this might help a few other people if I wrote it up. We’re running EC2 instances (AWS … Continue reading Managing Patches on AWS
Storing & managing passwords is really hard these days. Passwords are easier to crack. Breaches to one system mean other accounts can be exposed. Even the FBI’s most wanted can’t get it right. Even the systems you might depend on break. Best Practices for Passwords Lets just review best practices for passwords: Use a complex password. … Continue reading Password Storage Done Right
