Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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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...

3 min readRead more →
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...

5 min readRead more →
management•

How much coding should a manager do?

In my day job we use Slack as a key communication tool - for those who haven't used it, it's basically a corporate version of IRC with good UX. In a private channel for those in leadership positions, there was a question about how to transition from Software Engineer to Engineering Manager; what to consider when moving from a predominantly individual contributor (IC) specialisation to a team management focused role. My reply got an upvote from about 10% of the channel, so thought it a good start for my first blog post on the subject of management\: Q: How much...

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essays•

Are you happy?

A thought experiment occurred to me which looks to answer the question, "Are you happy?" In a science fiction film I saw recently there was a fantastical machine that copies (clones) whatever thing or person is placed inside it. Without ever explicitly going through the detail of the pros and cons of the situation, the people who use the machine to clone themselves do so at great risk to their very being. Because the ability to make another person, exactly the same as an existing one, has such devastating consequences its users preemptively setup a murder. And these consequences though...

4 min readRead more →
follies•

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...

11 min readRead more →
coding•

Insurance against LeftPad level events

When it comes to dependencies, there are two extremes in software development. Complete ownership of everything right down to the abstract data types e.g. "Yes I write my own open addressing hash table and hash map"; or on the other hand grabbing strangers' code left, right and centre e.g. "I'd rather have a dependency on some random, 12 line implementation of LeftPad because that's one less thing to bugfix, debug and maintain". As with all computer science trade offs, the majority feel comfortable somewhere in the middle. Done properly, I see the elegance of relying on small, composable dependencies but...

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