Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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fitness•

Question everything

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 the skeptical mindset you need to retain. Never lose your questioning, suspicious, doubting way of looking at new information that is given to you. There are a few good reasons for this: 1. I'm...

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Sacrifice and Results
fitness•

Sacrifice and Results

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 get fit without them, that's my view based on the way I see the world. It doesn't mean that millions of people haven't achieved their goals using the above tools, and done so quicker than trying to plot...

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fitness•

Change for life

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 considered e.g. when was the last time you changed your brand of toothpaste? There are certain things we're quite happy to try for a while and there are choices we made long ago and...

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fitness•

Snake oil selling better than ever

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 in fitness than at any time in the history of mankind. And to be fair, there are a lot of fit people around; there is a lot of sport being played...

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management•

Manager README

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 newbie, and I'm here to learn. For the foreseeable future I'll be asking questions, and specifically. I'll ask "Why?" a lot. Not to be annoying - even though...

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management•

Are you joining a good engineering team?

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 still, they won't be on the wrong end of undocumented, random, last minute feature changes. The job spec might have little basis in reality though. Whether or not a company follows an Agile process, either honestly or by...

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