Who owns the pager?
I hate on-call. I hate doing it, and I hate asking other people to do it, which is a slightly awkward position to hold when you’ve spent a decent chunk of your career around systems that other people expect to be awake …
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23 pages
Campfire
The people side of the craft: leadership, careers, mentoring, and the story of the blog itself.
The feature your users are already faking
Hailey didn’t raise a feature request. She didn’t ask me to add a button. She didn’t even describe it as something missing from krites. She just showed me what she’d already started doing.
What burnout taught me (more than once)
I once did a hundred hours in a weekend. Seventy-two of them without sleep, before I gave up and had a lovely little nap on the staff-room sofa, halfway through the Monday morning meeting, in front of everyone. Nobody …
Why my photo app won't build for Windows
I was wiring up the release build for krites, the wedding-photo culler I’ve been building for my wife, and I went to add Windows to the list of targets. It felt like the responsible thing. You write software, you ship it …
The take-home goes in the bin
Back in 2019 I wrote that recruiting people is effing hard, and then more or less left it there, because I had a stack of CVs to wade through and you had a day to be getting on with. That post was written from the slush …
The campsite was never the point
I named myself, professionally, after a rule about litter. The Boy Scout Rule is the one every camp drills into you: leave the campsite cleaner than you found it. Robert Baden-Powell’s version, in the last message he …
Why I still write code
By any sensible reading of an org chart, I have no business being in this file. I’m a Head of Software Engineering. My calendar reckons I should be in a room somewhere talking about headcount and roadmaps. Instead it’s …
Technical CV writing is still hard, and now a robot reads it first
Seven years ago I wrote a post called Technical CV writing is hard, pulled my own CV apart, and explained every choice in it. I even bragged that it converted to a first interview about eighty per cent of the time, then …
Moving this blog off Jekyll
The blog you’re reading used to be a Jekyll site on GitHub Pages, built on the lovely beautiful-jekyll theme. It isn’t any more: it’s Hugo now, published to GitLab Pages. The hosting move rode along with go-tool-base …
Technical CV writing is hard
Recruiting people is effing hard! That’s all… I’ll get back to reading through CVs now and let you get on with your day! Medicines Discovery Catapult is, at the time of writing, recruiting Software Engineers, and as …
