Latest Posts

The Feedback Culture is Backwards

Many companies have a feedback culture, where employees are encouraged to give each other feedback - normally ad-hoc and on request. Often, this results in a lot of positive feedback (I would still argue not enough). The other side is constructive feedback. Constructive feedback can be crucial to personal development, but many people feel like they don't get enough. I think we're looking at the problem backwards.

How To Get Nothing Done - The Talk Retrospective

Almost two years ago, I wrote a blog post about getting nothing done and I was pretty happy with it. It was born out of frustration with systems that value the act of working over getting things done. Particularly, starting lots of tasks and not finishing them. Then, when DevOps Days London announced its first conference back after a COVID break, I instantly knew I would submit it to the CFP. Thankfully, _How to Get Nothing Done_ was accepted. I had a great time speaking at DevOps Days and I'm sure I will submit a talk next year.

Inside Out vs Outside In Learning

In 2016 I was doing an internship at a brilliant company. We were having a chat over lunch and one of the developers said that they thought that you should learn how jQuery works before you use it. I call this Inside Out learning: learn how something works before you use it. Of course at the time, I was barely comfortable using jQuery.

I Rate the SOLID Principles

The SOLID Principles are a commonly referenced part of Object Oriented development, but are they any good? Which couldn’t we live without and which are forgettable.

How to get nothing done

Plenty of articles will give you help on how to get things done, but precious few help you do the opposite: minimise your productivity and spend the most time doing it possible. This is the definitive guide to reducing your productivity as a developer.

The Developer's Drum Kit

This morning, I came across a blog post on Engelbart's violin from 2012, describing how Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the computer mouse) created a device which, through combinations of the six buttons, would let you type any letter, with a device that fits in your pocket. This was a specialist instrument with a steep learning curve. Although I don't agree with it, the article is worth a read.

Refactoring is more important than design

There’s a tendency with new developers to teach them about design of code and make that a focus. This is by no means a bad thing. New developers often haven’t had to think about the code that they write before. It’s more important that you teach them how to refactor than design.

Major Blog Update

I started a new job in February and suddenly I’m doing some frontend development (but in a strange mix I’m also doing some machine learning). It’s been a real change and I’ve learned a lot about CSS, Sass and Vue. To celebrate this I’ve done a major refresh on the blog.

An Example Catch-Up Routine

Catch-ups are the most important thing you do as a manager. When I read a book or watch a talk about management and they ask themselves “If you wanted people to start one thing off the back of reading this what would it be?”, they invariably answer “catch-ups.” They:

Tests Show Intent

I recently came across a line of code that looked roughly like if((a() || b()) === false) { doSomething(); }. I’ve definitely written unnecessary equalities like this before. I generally prefer if(!a() && !b()) { doSomething(); } I’d seen something that could be better, and I wanted to change it. After all, you should leave the codebase better than you found it.

Hard Conversations and The Real Importance of Building Trust

At some point, you will have been told how important trust is. I would like you to focus on one case and how it can benefit your team.

Get To Five

You have to make decisions every day. We tend to get caught up in do I want to do this or that. Should we use X or Y. I use a very simple framework for making decisions. Just get to five.

The Power of Pure Positive Feedback

I am a big fan of positive feedback, and I would like to talk about why. This is inspired by a collection of thoughts from talks and blogs. It goes like this…

Experimentation

I've been reading at John Cutler's blog and Twitter for about a year. He makes me inspired to want to change things. To find areas that aren't going well and help them improve. Recently he published "So You Want to Fix Something?" a blog post that reads like a Twitter thread (because it is). I wish he had published it sooner.

The Thermometer Retro

The Thermometer Retro asks your team to decide what is going well and what isn’t going well and then focus on improving what isn’t going well.

When to use it: It’s great for teams that want to solve everything (even things that aren’t a problem), teams that have retros but struggle to find action points or something doesn’t feel right but you can’t tell what.

When not to use it: If negativity, team morale or team relationships is an issue, this probably isn’t the retro for you.

The Keybow

I've been a long time fan of the Raspberry Pi movement. Well, a fan from a distance. I was a teen during the initial release and the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi Model B. I never was really able to use it – a fate that seems to have befallen a great many of the Raspberry Pis – for a variety of reasons including but not limited to lack of Linux knowledge (notably that SSH was a thing), lack of space and lack of creativity. Nonetheless, I've been following the space and I recently spotted my opportunity with a review in The MagPi.

Mario Kart Next Steps - Part 1

So you’ve been playing Mario Kart for a while and it’s going well! You can beat the computers pretty much every time and you find yourself getting into first but losing it! This is a really frustrating stage to be at, so over the course of the next few blogs I’m going to give you some tips to keep you on top. For this blog I’ll be focusing on defensive item management.

New Blog Infrastructure

Hi all! This is a place where I’m tracking my own personal investigations and experimentations. Starting with this website. The eventual plan is for this to become a place with real advice for real people. For now I can look back on this as a reference and reminder for the things I’ve done and to cringe at the things I’ve said.