Campfire

The people side of the craft: leadership, careers, mentoring, and the story of the blog itself.

Rebuilding the website for a fifteenth-century coaching inn, which happens to be my dad's pub and the place I grew up in.

The hard part of on-call is not fixing broken systems at three in the morning. It is an employer borrowing a life it does not pay for.

The one real user of my photo tool was already faking a feature with a workaround. That workaround was the specification.

Burned out more than once across twenty years, and the point is that none of them looked the same as the one before it.

Dropping the Windows build of a photo tool rather than fixing it, and why that is the right call for a one-person project.

Hiring engineers for judgement rather than output, and why every part of a normal interview is measuring the wrong thing.

Ten years on from taking the name: the Boy Scout Rule scales from a function to a team, because it is about intention rather than size.

The case for a head of engineering staying hands-on, written as a confession rather than a boast, because the compulsion is the problem.

My CV stopped landing because a machine reads it before a person does. Reworking the structure for the filter without losing the voice.

Moving this blog from Jekyll and GitHub Pages to Hugo and GitLab Pages, and the two things I would do differently next time.