I Learnt

At the moment we are deep in the clutches of Storm Darragh as it batters the UK.

In an interview, Clay Herbert walks Nathan Barry through creating the best answer to the question “So what do you do?”.

Sam Harris gives away his content for free but still makes money.

The community for the CSS-Next repository recently had a vote to decide on a new official logo.

In a recent interview Mo Salah shared some advice he received from the ex-Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger that has stuck with him.

Finding a good available domain name for a project, product or company is hard but there is one web tool that I have found is more successful than others.

We use the technology Apache Kafka as a key element in the implementation of the distributed ledger we have developed.

A single, creative decision transformed our interactions with some junior engineers, boosting their morale and integrating them seamlessly into our team.

Making a sale of a Software as a Service (SaaS) product to a large enterprise customer can be slow and difficult.

A mobile app developer was frustrated recently by receiving a one star review for their application.

How do you start to design a new rollercoaster?

Often people are afraid to reach out to those above them in the hierarchy or in a different team, even if it is the best solution to their situation.

Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn’t been used in over forty years!

Ed Roberts is a forgotten person in the history of home computing but played a huge role in getting us to where we are today.

It is very easy to go through life and not realise the effects of loneliness.

Back in the mists of time if you wanted to take a photograph you would have to use a camera that you had to carry with you.

Sometimes it is handy to save a webpage for later and there are lots of ways to do it.

There is a well known story about an old man fixing an engine.

I support Somerset cricket club and have done since I was a kid.

I was not old enough to remember the first man on the moon - in fact I wasn’t even born until the following year.

It is very difficult to develop a simple piece of software and keep it simple.

We needed to plan the work for the next quarter for the infrastructure team and in doing so came up with a simple way to breakdown the work.

We recently visited a local Indian restaurant and they had an interesting way to explain the dishes on the menu.

At a recent off-site we ran a simple group exercise that will hopefully make a big difference to the success of the company

When I was at university, a long time ago, one of the books I really enjoyed was “The Cuckoo’s Egg” by Clifford Stoll.

I hadn’t updated my blog for a while so I thought I would write a short post about The Keeper Test.

Can a friend ask you for a chat when they really need one?

It is that time of year where performance and salaries are reviewed.

Do you suppress your emotions?

When I am working and need to focus I like to have music in the background.

For the first time in ages we had a family night at the cinema to see the film “One Life”.

A lot of coding jobs can involve fairly “normal” tasks - create a page, write to and read from a database, add a new field to this screen.

There is an idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back” which, according to Wikipedia, describes

My dad is pretty tech-savvy (he was an electronic engineer) however he was having problems with how long it took his Windows PC to become usable.

I enjoy doing jigsaws once a year, over the Christmas period.

During a team call this morning, one of the engineers mentioned about the useless things he still remembers and how it would be good if the brain would clear them out.

By now most people have tried or at least heard of ChatGPT.

I have just finished re-reading the book The Spark, a fictional account of a sports agent and his journey to learn about Cirque de Soleil from the inside.

I come up with lots of ideas for potential applications, businesses, stories and random other things.

My role has changed recently to include another team.

A task can often look too big to tackle.

Sometimes a decision comes with a cost, a sacrifice.

When I grew up I had an old 35mm Praktica camera that was given to me.

Turbo Pascal is 40 years old and it had a big impact on the direction of my career.

There is a quote “A backup is not a backup unless you have recently performed a restore from it”; I got to find this out the hard way.

We have manuals and guides for the software we use.

An oh no second is that moment in time when you realise that you have done something potentially catastrophic and your stomach turns to mush with the dread and realisation.

The role of the software developer is set for a major upheaval over the coming years.

There is a rush at the moment to add AI to everything with a fear that if you don’t then you will be left behind.

Foundations are important and need to be correct and strong before you build anything.