It's my birthday! As is customary, here's my year in review. See 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010. It has felt like a bit of a "holding pattern" year. When I started writing this post, I really didn't feel like I'd accomplished much. Turns out, I'm an idiot and have been franticly busy! Domestic Life Huge thanks to The Hodge for turning me on to this great way to track to-dos and…
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I don't run adverts on this blog. The most I do is the occasional Amazon Affiliate link when I'm reviewing some tech. I'm happy with that. The site doesn't cost me much to run, and I'm lucky enough that it increases my reputation and online goodwill. But I've been thinking recently about ways to make a more material gain from my blogging, tweeting, StackOverflowing, and GitHubbing. So, here…
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As of today, I've been employed by GDS for two years. Time for some reflections. The Big Working for the government isn't much different from working for a large business. I know people harp on about the inefficiency of the public sector - I can only assume those people haven't seen how much money FTSE100 companies waste on nonsense. The work is important. Don't get me wrong, I loved my time…
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It's fun to grumble about a product. Sending snarky tweets, writing ranty blog-posts for those sweet HackerNews page-views, and generally complaining about how crap something is. Admit it, you do it too! I do it too often. The thing is, that's the easy way out. Much harder is engaging in constructive dialogue, submitting decently detailed issues, and crafting useful pull requests. So, I'm…
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It's my birthday! As is customary, here's my year in review. See 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010. At the risk of tempting fate, I've had an extremely good year! I've survived a year in a new job - working at GDS to implement Open Standards. As part of that, I got to fulfil a long-held ambition to visit Beijing. I also visited the Isle of Man (a first for me) and Rome (a welcome return). A…
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Recently, I've become obsessed with the speed and efficiency of my web sites. I'm in the middle of slimming down this blog - but I thought I'd take a first attempt at my contact site - https://edent.tel/ A few weeks ago, the .tel registry released their domain restrictions - users can now host their site anywhere. I'd already experimented with about.me/edent as a contact site - but even that…
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Rather than wait until the end of the December, I like to use my birthday to reflect on how the year has been. This has been a very weird year. I mean, even aside from all the news, it was just an absolute mess of a year. I ended 2015 by unexpectedly winning tickets to the Star Wars premiere! That day in December was, basically, the high point of 2016... I started off the year with an amazing …
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Welcome to my yearly NaBloPoMo - where I attempt to publish a new blog post every day in November. This year is likely to be challenging as I've just started a new job. As of last month, I am the Open Standards Lead at Government Digital Service - part of Cabinet Office. As ever, this blog is personal - and never reflects the views of my employers, past-, present-, or future! I am also now…
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After four fun-packed years of Digital Disruption, it's time for me to move on from The Lab at O2. I've had an amazing time, building 3D printers, charging phones from lemons, building paper-prototypes with unemployed people, finding all sorts of interesting security bugs, teaching kids to code, redesigning the nation's gas bills, creating holographic iPhone displays, speaking all over the…
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Friends, allow me to wallow in a little boasting! Four years ago, I made a modest proposal for a new HTTP Code to indicate censorship. A few days ago, RFC 7725: An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles became an approved standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force. This allows a website, proxy, or ISP to explain to the user that the resource the user requested is unavailable for…
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The planet Earth has completed yet another cycle of carrying me around the sun, and so it is time to cast an eye backwards. Despite this blog, I'm not much of a diary keeper. Since the demise of FourSquare I've not kept particularly good track of where I've been or what I've been up to. Still, let's see what memories of the last year I can dredge up, eh? December 2014 I created a…
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The two big memes of our entrepreneurial age are Go big, or go home! And Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett Well, I've failed and now I'm heading home. Last year I applied for a place on a Master's programme at the Oxford Internet Institute. I was desperate to spend a year studying the Social Science of the Internet. It felt like it was…
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