I go to lots of hack days and hackathons. Some are big corporate affairs, some are boutique community events. They all have one thing in common - Geeks suck at giving demos. You have 3 minutes to convince the judges - or your peers - that you've built something brilliant. How do you do that? One Hundred and Eighty Seconds. It is not a lot of time. So here are my top 3 tips for succeeding at a…
Continue reading →
This is a follow-up post to 2015's "What's Your Christian Name?". tl;dr "Christian Name" used to be synonymous with "First Name" or "Given Name". The majority of people in the UK are not Christian and, therefore, don't have Christian Names. Yet there are lots of local Government forms which still insist on this archaic phrasing. Here are a few of my "favourites". Local Government First up,…
Continue reading →
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. Terry Pratchett The law leaves indelible traces in our language. In the UK, cars have to undergo an annual vehicle…
Continue reading →
I'd recently given a talk at a conference and was gently basking in the glow of people telling me how fabulous I was, when some entitled prick came up to me and said... Great talk, mate! Really interesting stuff. But... "Oh great!" I thought. "Here it comes..." To play Devil's Advocate for a moment, have you... "No. Stop." I said. And, to my surprise, he did. "The Devil doesn't need any more …
Continue reading →
I am not an economist - so perhaps someone more intellectually equipped than me has already written a better version of this blog post. "I, Pencil" by Leonard E. Read is an influential essay on the nature of free-market capitalism. It correctly points out that the modern world is so complex and interdependent that no one man can know his true place in it. The world is impossible to control, so …
Continue reading →
These are the lyrics to my constant earworm: Sometimes my life it feels like fiction Some of the days it's really quite surreal George Harrison - Pisces Fish I occasionally find myself having meetings in the Palace of Westminster with People From The News. I want to talk about what that's like. I'm waiting to go in to an office, quietly rehearsing what answers I'm going to give. Sat over…
Continue reading →
One of my favourite works of art is The Great Bear by Simon Patterson. At first glance, it appears to be a normal London Tube map. But look closer... Cool! But there is something about it which has always bothered me. Each Tube line represents a theme - therefore, a station at the intersection of multiple lines should be represented by someone who matches all of those themes. For example,…
Continue reading →
Intrigue is swirling around Lyra once more. Her daemon Pantalaimon is witness to a brutal murder, and the dying man entrusts them with secrets that carry echoes from their past. They learn of a city haunted by daemons, of a desert said to hold the secret of Dust. Powerful forces are about to throw Lyra and Malcolm together once again. And the dangers they face will challenge everything they…
Continue reading →
This is a minor obsession of mine. The crew of JMC Red Dwarf are familiar with 20th Century pop-culture - but they never mention Doctor Who. Why? In various episodes they talk about The Flintstones, Casablanca, Marilyn Monroe, Laurel & Hardy, and all sorts of TV shows. But Doctor Who is strangely absent. There can only be one logical explanation. Lister and the gang exist the same universe as…
Continue reading →
For years, my email address was registered with our electricity supplier. I got the monthly bills sent to me. My wife's email was used for the water supplier. This made sense when we were a young couple with separate finances - but now we're a smug an old married couple, with a joint bank account, it's a bit annoying. We both want to see the bills, and we don't want to rely on the other…
Continue reading →
We're back again with Kim Rowan. Listen to her thoughts about what it's like to become a manager of technical teams. 🔊 💾 Download this audio file. Read about how she got into tech. …
Continue reading →
Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. I'm a civil servant in the UK. Luckily, I suppose, I don't often have access to TOP SECRET information. I suppose I could leak the canteen's lunch m…
Continue reading →
