Life Beyond Fife

I love hacking together code to make awesome things; mainly I love sharing what's worked for me.

Software Engineer Dystopia or Hegemony

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 available. I chose Drupal. After publishing 26 blog posts, I made the sensible switch to the more lightweight WordPress. Still requiring a server and database, and built on PHP (a truly...

17 min readRead more →

management•19 December 2025

I have a book for that

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 invariably keep coming back to. First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham — This is the book every new manager must read. Based on over 80,000 interviews with real managers,...

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essays•27 July 2025

Defend your codebase against AI comments

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 tweet. Maybe at one point the plastic container did hold basmati rice, but today, it’s clearly storing biscuits. This is it, the fundamental point: the compiler ignores your comments, so their relationship to the truth holds no...

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essays•8 July 2025

The Slow Path to Everything

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 reveals where we could be heading next. It’s all code, in one place My first job as a software developer in the early 2000s was a lesson in how not to do things. The best example I can give is how version...

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essays•11 June 2025

The Deployment Constraint: Speed, Safety, and Automation

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 achieve safety with simple processes, but speed becomes the casualty. This tension plays out in predictable patterns across the industry. Teams prioritising speed and simplicity push code quickly with minimal testing, accepting the safety risks that come with “move...

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management•29 December 2024

Why 5 Whys isn't enough

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 SSL cert. It wasn’t the outage that made me concerned; it was the attitude of the team who had the outage. “What steps have you taken to make...

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