This is a personal blog. Opinions here are my own, not my employer's.
Recent posts
- A Journey from Chaos to Version Control: A Developer's Tale Horror Development
A true story from my first programming job. When I started that job in 2003 we did not have version control (VCS) for our PHP source code. I was told we did not need it, and that was that. Or was it?
- Alien Artefacts Development
The purpose of this blog post is to introduce the concept of alien artefacts, a subcategory of legacy code that is highly resistant to change despite being well-designed and performing a critical function. It provides insights into the challenges engineers face when dealing with such code and offers practical advice on how to effectively maintain it.
- Levelling up Pull Requests Development
I share how I tackled the challenge of reducing cycle time for getting pull requests approved within my team, using the first habit from "7 Habits of Highly Effective People": Be Proactive.
Favourite posts
These are my three all-time favourite posts.
- My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy Talks Hiring
This is a transcript of a lightning talk I gave at a company "all hands" get-together. I tell the story of my "hiring experience" as a sonar operator on a submarine in the Norwegian Navy. To tie it into work, I included a little hiring-related lesson at the end.
My first to reach the HackerNews front page. In weeks it got orders of magnitude more hits than the rest of my site put together.
- Potter Coding Dojo in Clojure Clojure
Detailing my trials and tribulations with the "Potter" coding dojo problem, with code examples in Clojure.
I like it because of the amount of iterations I went through, and the discussions I had with coworkers about it at all-hands.
- Rise of the Machine Hacks
I ruminate on implementing a simple virtual machine—for a simple language—in C.
I like this one because it was such a great learning experience!
Publications Elsewhere
This is a list of some of my talks & blog posts elsewhere:
- A Guide To Personal Retrospectives in Engineering
A blog post co-written with Cian. I wrote a brief post introducing it.
- My NET-A-PORTER TECHNICAL BLOG entries (2013–2014)
These are my contributions to the NET-A-PORTER TECHNICAL BLOG. Including, but not limited to, a shell & regexp primer, maximising cache hit rates for REST APIs, and Akka musings.
The original site is no longer online, but the WayBackMachine remembers.
- Delighting your users with SBJson 4 (2013) SpeakerDeck
This is my first Pecha Kucha style talk, made at NSLondon meetup. The sound is not great, and one of my slides is a bit misleading. Nevertheless I have a special fondness for this one. It was the first time someone I didn't know contacted me to ask me to give a talk.
The video is no longer online, so I've linked to the slides instead.
- Overcoming U-turns and Dead Ends: Lessons of using Scala, Akka & Spray on Heroku (2013)
I presented this "experience talk" at Scala eXchange 2013 with Sam Dean. (I'm afraid you have to log in to view the video.) It's a mish-mash of stuff we learnt while building the backend of The Netbook—NET-A-PORTER's social network offering.
- Testing C with Libtap (2006)
I gave a talk at YAPC::NA 2005 on this topic, and a member of the audience approached me to write it up as an article for ONLamp magazine. This was the result.
Sadly it is no longer online at the original URL, but the WayBackMachine has my back!
- Creating HTML with M4 (2002)
A long, long time ago I used
make
andcpp
to maintain my website. Later I upgraded tom4
. I wrote an article on the subject, and Linux Magazine published it.