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Coaching: Understanding the options
I recently wrote a few things about coaching and said I might start a series of coaching notes. Here we go! In that post I mentioned my early habit of breaking into coaching conversations at every opportunity. While coaching’s often useful, it’s not the answer to every question — and and even if I think
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A few things about coaching
I’ve been a fan of coaching for years, it can really help people or teams improve how they work. When I was first introduced to this skill there were a few things I didn’t find obvious and took a while to learn. First chance to do some training I’d read about coaching and thought I
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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