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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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • “How do I do that in TypeScript?”: Some things I’d still like to know

    I tried using Advent of Code to learn TypeScript and it worked very well. I’m much more used to Python and often know what I’d write in that language, so asking “How do I do that in TypeScript?” for some fairly unusual topics has prompted me to learn more about this new language. I’ve written already about…

  • “How do I do that in TypeScript?”: Memoization with decorators

    I wrote last year about how I’m using Advent of Code to learn TypeScript – I often know what I’d like to write in Python, and sometimes the “How do I do that in TypeScript?” question doesn’t have an obvious answer. What was I trying to do? Some puzzles can be solved using memoization: when…