You can tell a workplace is broken when the good employees are exhausted and the bad employees are comfortable.

git worktrees are simple and very handy. I rarely switch branches in one worktree, as typically I will be working on multiple branches in parallel.

A man walks into a bar in a small town. The bartender asks him what he does, and he says he's a doctor. In the next hour, five people show up at the bar asking to see the doctor. Two bring children. What does that tell you? The town has no doctor, or he's not very good. That's like the meeting we had with users yesterday. We wanted to ask about one specific thing, but they overwhelmed us with a dozen other urgent needs. I want to hear about those needs. But it tells that me either no one in the Product organization represents them, or they're not doing their job.

Company hackathon: For three days you get to work on ideas that can benefit the company. Why aren't we doing this every day? What do you think we're doing on a normal work day? What?

oh, I'd forgotten this prediction. Right on track!

Ukraine is going to emerge from this war with the world's most advanced drone capability. Breadth of options, huge manufacturing capacity, highly optimised tech, tried and tested strategies and tactics, a huge number of highly trained and literal battle tested personell. It's truly something to behold.

Tax code tech debt...

But what do they all do? facebook is the same dumpster fire it's always been. I understand scaling was a huge challenge in the early years, but now?

Yup. Retirement doesn't have to mean checking out and becoming a vegetable. For me it will primarily be about checking out of the inananity of the corporate world and *expanding* the amount of stuff I do.

Please don't ever view or edit a CSV file in excel.

Popped into screwfix on a Saturday morning expecting the usual queues. It was just me in there and a bored teenager on the counter 🤷

Earlier in the year a competitor company suffered a ransom attack. Their systems never came back up due to data loss, and the company is effectively failed at this point. We had one or two integrations with them that got switched over in a few days, and many of their customers came our way and were rapidly on boarded. We had a big push, not for security this time but for disaster recovery, as that was where the most significant gap was perceived to be.

oh no! 🙁

"sOfTwAre iS a sOlvEd pRoBleM" 🤪

What's stopping you from local LLM prompting like this?

I left school when I was 17 (got 'asked to leave', is the more accurate term I guess). This was 1997. My unqualified, entry-level salary was more than the average salary now. My Dad - hopping mad - had sent me to three months of secretarial college and I came out into an £18k job in the local Glaxo factory as an admin assistant. To give a sense of how long ago this was - my boss would hand-write messages onto sheets of paper and I would touch-type them into this new-fangled 'email' thing she couldn't fathom. Nearly 30 years later, the equivalent - in purchasing power at least - would be £36k. A year later, I parlayed that up to a £21k job in the R&D side - still as a PA, 18 years old. I saved up and went to Taiwan to teach English for a bit. When I got back, I went to London and got a job earning £24k designing presentations and documents in a marketing agency. I was 20yo. The equivalent in 2026 would be £46k. With zero qualifications beyond the ability to touch-type and a certificate saying I could use Word, Excel and PowerPoint, I was on 1.35x the average salary now. I made a lot of mistakes as a kid. Most of my mates did. But the economy I lived in allowed the messiness of life to roll out. We could learn, take risks and still be able to live and breathe. We are failing future generations. And we have a generation that's already been failed. Our politicians are addicted to cheap slogans. They want power, not service. The failure of their reality-denying ideologies continues to spiral outwards. Yes, immigration plays a role. Yes, housing, technology and deindustrialisation play a role. But the state has morphed into a deeply incompetent, self-indulgent boondoggle machine, that spends more time bribing voters than it does serving - or investing in - the country.

I do this joke all the time 💫