Life Beyond Fife

Sabbaticals are about transition, and preparing to make the stage beyond the transition successful.

Code being written instantaneously by AI makes expertise in the craft of software engineering more valuable, not less.

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've finished rewriting my 15 year WordPress blog from the ground up as a static Next.js site.

I realised I had gained a reputation for recommending books when it became a joke on Slack.

Generative AI tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Roo Code, Windsurf have fundamentally changed the process of how software is written.

Over twenty years in software development, I’ve witnessed an evolution in how code integrates with other code.

In software deployment, there exists a fundamental tension between three critical factors: speed, safety, and automation.

5 Whys is a prevalent engineering process in a modern tech company.

To convince someone, tell them why, then how, then what, in that order.

“This team isn’t delivering enough.”

If you gave two options to someone who cared about business outcomes, about what they could have, which do you think they’d choose?

Perform an activity frequently enough, and you will start to see patterns.

I'm currently trying to hire as many software engineers as I can, and more and more I'm seeing applications from candidates who retrained via an intense, engineering bootcamp.

It has been a while since I wrote my first manager README.

This is perhaps only my second, and hopefully final, time where I play futurist.

Thank you for joining me on this journey of learning the how and why of becoming fit, specifically concentrating on strength training.

The introduction to why getting strong is hard began with the idea that the beginning of the journey toward strength is easy.

You don't just walk up to the biggest weight you've ever seen in your life and try to pick it up.

A tree touches the world with its leaves and ever-burrowing roots, the edges of this complex organism supported and fueled by the tree trunk.

I remember watching a comedy lifting video on YouTube that had a line in it like, "No one likes 'Leg Day'.

Moving from aerobic based exercises to anaerobic means not only changing the exercises themselves, but also how you approach and rest between exercises.

There is no new lesson in this chapter, merely a reiteration of two previously made points.

The key to strength is in making compound lifts the basis of your training routine.

I remember growing up when I had some small dumbbells around the house.

Before you take a single decision in how you're going to train for becoming strong, you need to understand the difference between free weights and fixed resistance machines.

Choosing to concentrate on strength training is a solid decision.

The food that you eat, which fuels your exercise and aids your recovery, is every bit as important as the training routine you execute.

Having learned about the different fitness types, and about to make a change for life, you may have ideas about the type of body or changes you want to make.

We’ve already talked about how training is stress that the body can recover from.

Conventional wisdom says that getting fit is losing fat.

Up to now you may have thought of fitness or looking good as simply losing weight.

Fitness means different things to different people.

You set yourself a fitness goal.

Up to now I've asked you to consider the reason for getting fit on the pure physical benefits: the increased ability to be active for longer, the energy and endorphins you will have in store to attack your daily tasks and projects.

Anthony Bourdain has summed up the key problem of motivation in a single, relatable quote: > "I understand there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies.

Stress has a negative image.

Exercise is running round the block for five minutes.

It's very easy to begin something with the best of intentions and say things like, "Every little helps." or "It can't do any harm." without knowing if your efforts are having any effect whatsoever.

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.

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.

Banks will often advertise promotions offering sizeable sums of money for opening an account.

This is the first in a long series of posts about fitness.

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.

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.

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.

A thought experiment occurred to me which looks to answer the question, "Are you happy?"

During the #firstsevenjobs trend on Twitter, I tweeted my rather standard career path into software.

When it comes to dependencies, there are two extremes in software development.

Again and again, I find web development one of the most fascinating of all the disciplines I've come across in my career.