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I wrote in “Some things I love about advent of code” about how I was using Advent of Code to help learn TypeScript. I did some of the old puzzles in Python – a language I’m comfortable with – then redid them in this language I’m brand new to. This gave me a chance to…

We’ve covered several things about OKRs already: Today, in part 4, we’ll look at a few things it took me quite a while to realise. It’s easy to get excited about the promise of OKRs: aim for outrageous success, and if you get anywhere close to it you’ll still have got much further than you…

This is a multi-part writeup of a talk I gave. So far we have: Let’s move on to the next thing that nobody tells you: Various companies have been vocal over the years about using OKRs and how they’ve been important to their success. Most prominent of these is Google, the first place John Doerr…

In part 1, I set the scene for this series, but didn’t get as far as ticking off any of the 10 things – let’s see if we can make more progress this time… I’m interested in the OKR origin story. They were made famous by John Doerr, an investor and venture capitalist who brought…

I gave a talk on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results, a goal-setting framework) after years of using them and looking into how to make them work better for me. I’ve written before about how useful I find writing this kind of talk: The act of just getting a talk planned helps summarise and bring together…

You might have heard the “Boaty McBoatface” story: In 2016, there was an online poll to name a new Antarctic research vessel. Members of the public could suggest names and vote for their favourites – and the overwhelming winner was “Boaty McBoatface”. The Natural Environmental Research Council decided not to go with the popular choice,…

It’s very rare that I get asked to appear on a podcast – until recently, it had happened just once, about 5 years ago. Then, 2 came along at once! Both of these episodes got released in June 2024. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my parents about anything I write / appear…

I read “Future babble: Why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway” (Dan Gardner, 2010) when I was looking into a series of blog posts on “Minimum Viable Estimation”. There’s sometimes a view that the software industry in particular has problems with estimation – but this book has lots of evidence that predicting…

Every blog ends up here at some point: blogging about the process of writing posts, about the tech setup that makes the blog work, about the way the blog is laid out and organised … I’m planning to mention that stuff just once, in this post, and then get back to the kind of things…

I saw a post from Kent Beck (author of Extreme programming explained, Tidy first, and lots more) on LinkedIn: Iodine was isolated in 1811. In 1813, iodine deficiency was proposed as the cause of thyroid problems like goiters. In 1954 the last canton in Switzerland (where iodine was especially scarce because glaciers) mandated iodized salt.…