Category: Uncategorized

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.…

This post describes a workshop format I’ve used a few times: help a team think through risks and possible disasters that might affect a piece of work, before the work starts and while there’s still time to do something to avoid all those bad outcomes. What’s a futurespective? Teams often do “retrospectives”: Looking back, reflecting,…

This is a writeup from a series of talks and workshops I’ve given on this topic. So far: This post, part 6, is the last in the series. There’s a lot more techniques you could look into for estimation, but for this “what’s the least you can get away with” series, we’ve seen enough. Today,…

I’ve mentioned recently how much I enjoy Advent of Code challenges (no spoilers here, don’t worry). One topic I’ve found fascinating is how to write algorithms that find their way around graphs. There’s a lot of history on how people came up with things, and a wide range of problems they can help with (not…

Advent of Code is an advent calendar of coding puzzles – one puzzle appears every day from 1st to 25th December. Each puzzle is in two parts; solving the first part (by writing some code to work out the right answer, and pasting it into the site) gets you a star, and unlocks the second…

This is a writeup from a series of talks and workshops I’ve given on this topic. So far: This post, part 5, describes a workshop to help practice coming up with those ranges – a way to make them just wide enough so you’re confident they include the right answer. This skill is useful for…