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Book look: The secrets of consulting, by Gerald Weinberg
I’d seen recommendations for this book in lots of places, for years, before I got round to reading it. I assumed it’d be long, serious, and probably not too relevant to me (my job isn’t consultancy). I was wrong! It’s short and funny, with handy advice for people in all kinds of jobs. I’ve made
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Algorithms IRL: Let’s solve a Rubik’s cube!
A few months ago my son asked how you solve a Rubik’s cube. I had no idea so we looked it up. A helpful YouTube video from The Great Courses showed us how to solve one in 8 steps. It took a few watches and lots of back and forth, but we did it! And
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A list of links after Agile in the Ether IRL 2026
In February 2026 I went to Liverpool for Agile in the Ether’s 3rd one-day, in-real-life annual event. For lots of info on how the event worked and what sessions we had, see Emily Webber’s write up: Agile in the Ether IRL 2026: No Slides, Just Vibes. I always come away from these events with piles
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Advent of Code 2025: How did it Go?
I posted a few weeks ago about learning Go with Advent of Code. I’m a big fan of these puzzles — they’re still hard enough for me that it’s a fun challenge, and trying to do them in a new language really lets me explore whether I’ve learned it well enough for it to get
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Optimising Life, using advice from Quake
I’m a big fan of Advent of Code, it’s taught me about lots of topics. Maybe the most generally useful lesson I’ve taken from it followed the “should I stop and read a book” post I mentioned a few years ago: There’s lots of puzzles where my solution looks like a reasonable approach, works just
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Learning Go with Advent of Code
Advent of Code has been a December tradition for me for the last 5 years — I’ve posted before about why I like it so much — and I’m looking forward to 2025’s event starting soon. This year’s format has a few changes, to make it a bit less stressful for the organiser Eric Wastl,
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Deliver Sessions: Don’t Panic!
I co-organise Deliver Sessions meetup along with Chris Burns and Zoe Rigley, and try to write a few notes after each one so I remember all the great topics we cover. For the September 2025 meetup, we got Matt Thornhill, one of the meetup’s founders, back as an attendee — next time we’ll need to
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What’s true just for me and you?
This is an activity I’ve used a few times and found useful, so I thought I’d write it up in case anyone else wants to try it. I think I made this up myself, but if you’ve seen this before please let me know — maybe I saw a version somewhere once and forgot about
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Deliver Sessions: This meetup has potential
July‘s Deliver Sessions was at Greater Manchester Digital Security Hub (DiSH) near Deansgate, where Barclays hosted us. We had two talks, one on hiring for potential and one on unlocking the potential of your teams. A nice pairing! Where do we draw the line at potential? Why it’s important to hire for potential and the