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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…
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Lots of links from LeadDev’s LDX3
I went to London for LDX3 in June 2025. This brought 3 other conferences together for the first time (LeadDev, StaffPlus and LeadingEng) into one huge conference with lots of tracks, activities and attendees. I came away with a long list of links to look into later. This post should be handy for me to…
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Deliver Sessions: Doing things differently
In May 2025 Deliver Sessions meetup was hosted by Transform, and we heard two talks on the theme of “doing things differently”. It was a great turnout: 64 attendees, a post-pandemic record. This time, we were in the Express Building, a striking building which must have looked space age when it was built in the…
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Deliver Sessions: From Oops to Eureka
April 2025’s Deliver Sessions was at Forward Role‘s offices, just off Deansgate in Manchester city centre. This time, we had two talks about getting better at problem solving. Harry and Agnieszka have both had lots of experience with issues that come from rushing into work and challenges, and stories of how taking time to think things…
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10 things nobody tells you about OKRs, part 7
I had aimed to get this series on OKR things finished inside of a quarter – I had progress graphs and everything. We got to 7 out of 10 by the very last day of that quarter (December 31st), then up to 9 out of 10 just days into the next quarter (January 4th), and…