Friday, Jun 27, 2025
One of the things that really makes me smile about the rise of “vide-coding” or AI-assisted coding is that it works best when your projects are already well-built. The things I’ve been preaching for the last 15 years still matter. In fact, they might matter more than ever.
Clean structure, consistent standards, good documentation, clear versioning, helpful comments, embedded security, and human-readable code aren’t just best practices they are enablers. Whether you’re working with a team of humans or an AI that’s pretending to be one, these principles make everything smoother. They reduce friction, prevent confusion, and allow tools (and teammates) to reason about your work more effectively.
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Thursday, Apr 3, 2025
A fun one for the afternoon. I often talk to my kids about goals. You know the kind—SMART goals, growth goals, stretch goals, and all the other acronyms we’ve seen in workbooks or performance reviews. I try to keep those conversations simple and relatable, especially when it’s just casual chats over dinner or on the school run. And when I think about the goals I share with them, there’s always one that I bring up regularly.
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Tuesday, Mar 11, 2025
Quite excitingly, I have just about gotten around to tagging v6.0.0 of my docker-ansible project (Ansible (of all flavours 🍦) in Docker images (of all flavours 🍦). The latest change has made a massive uptick in amount of container images available as they are now all available on armv8 (for all the Graviton or Mac users).
Interestingly enough, I think that this might be the first major change that wasn’t actually made (and probably broken) by me, so a huge acknowledgement of my Epam colleague Pavel Pikta for assisting in the move from GitLab CI to GitHub Actions.
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Wednesday, Mar 5, 2025
Interesting perspective on Should Managers Still Code. I have moved less away from day-to-day coding (probably throughout my late 20s to early 30s), however, I always try to stay engaged. In fact, I probably have a greater breadth of coding experience now, despite the fact that I don’t write hundreds, or thousands of lines a month now.
I love the concept that you still understand how the code works and how it is being delivered, but for me it is as much about staying out of the way and not interrupting expert flow, whilst still being able to give guidance and assistance when needed.
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Tuesday, Feb 25, 2025
Enjoyed looking through this project this morning, mdq - Markdown Parser basically a parser for markdown to do fun things to select items like it is json from markdown (that is a terrible description). It is strange as internally, I mainly document things inside Markdown (shakes fist at Confluence) especially as it mean that I can more easily version control things.
To add to that its conceptual extension of jq which is not only a great tool for the least worst text based structured data but also been used for so many glue things that I forget.
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Tuesday, Feb 11, 2025
It’s been fascinating to watch the ongoing debate around “return to office” (RTO) versus “work from home” (WFH) unfold over the past couple of years. There’s been no shortage of opinions—executives calling people back, employees pushing back, media stories with loaded headlines—but in many cases, the conversation has felt more political or emotional than data-driven. That’s why it’s so refreshing to come across broader, US-centric data that cuts through the noise and shows us what’s actually happening.
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Thursday, Nov 21, 2024
How true is it that “security is everyone’s responsibility”? I know that in principle this is true but in practice it is exceptionally hard for everyone to understand the context and overall risk.
I was reading yesterday about DevOps being not an easy entry to working in IT as there is often a large amount of different and separated tools that are required. And I had a large discussion with a friend recently about how the industry has become very specialised. When I started developing/engineering, I would often know a bit about lots of things; PHP, Python, Javascript, Server Admin, Networking. Whereas now we almost require experts in a small sub-section of this (Javascript to React to Next.js). But how can you understand security context if you are super-specialised in one area?
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Thursday, May 9, 2024
There’s a quiet little ritual I find myself doing whenever I’m asked to enter a date of birth into an online form—especially when I don’t want to give away my real one. No, I don’t go for something obviously fake like “01/01/1900” or use my pet’s birthday. Instead, I go straight for January 1st, 1970. Not because it’s plausible. Not because it’s subtle. But because it’s the start of the Unix timestamp, and somewhere deep down, I hope it confuses their database just a little.
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Tuesday, Apr 9, 2024
It often seems like we’re caught in an endless cycle of redefining roles and disciplines within tech—DevOps, DevSecOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Engineering—each iteration arriving every two or three years to align with the latest trend, tool, or methodology. While these evolving titles and categories attempt to capture real changes in practice and tooling, they also tend to muddy the waters. At a certain point, you start to wonder: can’t we just call all of this Software Engineering and move on?
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Tuesday, Aug 8, 2023
I still can’t get over how people code with a white background. It’s one of those things that continues to baffle me, even after years of seeing it as the default in so many tools. Sure, for quick edits—like tweaking a file in GitHub or reviewing a merge request in GitLab—it’s fine. But when it comes to sitting down and actually writing or debugging code, a bright white editor just feels wrong. It’s harsh on the eyes, especially during long sessions or in low-light environments, and it often leads to more strain and fatigue than necessary.
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