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Follies

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Sabbatical II
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Sabbatical II

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 you're reading right now! Low cost, low maintenance, low latency, easy to ship. Extremely happy with the results, and it got me thinking about the future of software. Keynote Talk for Acast...

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Speedrunning A Failed Business
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Speedrunning A Failed Business

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 a Coursera MOOC called Startup Engineering. Knowing how to code, but not a thing about making a business, I took away a key...

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Software Engineer Dystopia or Hegemony
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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...

18 min readRead more →
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How I became a data scientist

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 it didn't work out. history of me Before launching straight into recent history, I'll briefly cover my early career where I was a computer scientist researcher. Growing up I...

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Yo dawg, I heard you like functions
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Yo dawg, I heard you like functions

It's hopefully old news to you all but the free lunch is over (NB this article is 10 years old). TL;DR – as we come up against the physical limits of how small transistors can be future computation gains will come from more processors, not faster processors. We can already see this looking at the number of cores we have available in development standard laptops. Writing code that can distribute its workload across multiple cores will only become more important as time goes on. As we move more and more services to AWS ensuring we get the most value for...

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A git workflow for beginners
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A git workflow for beginners

The web is awash with introductions and guides to using git. There's this visual guide here, that interactive tutorial there, reams of documentation, and of course all kinds of troubleshooting help. But if you're coming from a traditional Version Control System (SVN, Perforce, Clearcase etc.) the main barrier to using git is not answering the question, "How to I checkout and commit code changes?", but rather, "How do I use all these complex features to develop software?" This guide is a complementary resource to the others, providing a working template of how you should use git in order to deliver...

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