This is ZX81.org.uk

Old Mans War

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:22:22 +0800

Another John Scalzi book, and another good one. This one is (arguably) his first novel. Quite military based, which tends not to be my favourite.

The premise is that a bunch of old people – hence the title – join the military for, effectively, a new life. Their bodies get some upgrades to make it worthwhile. Skipping a lot of detail there because much of the fun is finding out what’s happening.

What makes this book, for me, are the characters and the banter between them. It all seems, for want of a better word, real. It’s believable, and the bickering is convincing.

Maybe unsurprisingly for a book about armies and battles, there’s a lot of death but it’s balanced by a lot of heart.

I probably would not have got to this book had I not read some of his others first. That would have been a shame, as there’s a lot to like!

Acquisition FAQ

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:48:11 +0800

Has the company that you work for just announced that they are being acquired? Are you anxious? Are you wondering what comes next?

Obviously I can’t respond to all the specifics about your particular situation, but I do I have a track record of the companies I work for being acquired. Once, the company that acquired us was itself acquired. I’ve even started making a joke of it interviews: if your exit plan is to be bought rather than IPO, I’m your man I say. (I’m a blast, you should hire me!)

I’ve seen the fear in peoples eyes when it’s announced and, while I can’t say the fear is entirely misplaced, I can talk you through some of what you can expect in the coming days and months. Of course, every acquisition is different, every role is different, and everyone is different. But the list of things that you can influence has been fairly consistent so you can at least calibrate your expectations.

As an added benefit, you may be able to get a reputation for zen-like calm when everyone else is panicking around you.

I should add that my experience is mostly around startups being bought by much bigger enterprises. If you’re dealing with something more like a merger you might find that things are quite different. And it should go without saying that my experience is entirely subjective; if you’re lucky you’ll get a much better deal than I’ve ever seen! I’m also doing a lot of “averaging” here. None of the following is the story of any particular acquisition.

# Denial

It may be a bit cliched by this point, but the Kübler-Ross model is a good place to start.

The first stage – denial – will come from people who say that nothing will change.

Of course things will change.

Change can be unsettling and you may have a few nights of less-than-perfect sleep while your subconscious catches up with the reality. There will be change. Maybe not today, but in the near future. Think about it: what’s the point of buying a company if everything remains the same?

# Anger

You’ll find that many people are immediately angry about the whole thing. The founders are sell-outs. Or, if they had to sell, why did they sell to [insert name of soulless corporation here]? They immediately update their CV/resume and start talking to recruiters.

While I’d say that updating your CV at this point might be pragmatic, immediately trying to jump ship is probably premature. (Unless you manage to snag a really great offer, in which case, go for it. It’s not unusual for recruiters to be on the lookout for disgruntled employees of acquired companies.)

An exception might be that you’ve worked for the acquiring company before and know that you can’t handle what’s about to come. Or that you work in a part of the company that services the rest of it, like HR, finance or IT. Those functions are almost always “let go” rather than get merged into the new parent company.

For software companies, they’ll probably want to keep a lot of engineers and customer facing staff. If you think about it, about the only asset a software company has is the people. They may have different opinions about the right size of team, though. In short, while there are never any guarantees – hence the uncertainty – there’s a decent chance that they’ll want you to stay. The question is: do you want to?

# Bargaining

Let’s assume that you’re going to stay, if only for a few months to see how it all plays out.

Your current management team stands up at an all-hands meeting and explains that everything is cool and nothing significant is going to change. This has happened every time for me and they’re either lying or naive, and I honestly don’t know which. Things will change. Some changes will be good – honest. But many will not be. Your first reaction might be to fight for everything you currently have.

Sadly that’s just not realistic.

There are battles that are winnable and some that are not. If you’re to maintain your zen-like calm, you need to understand which is which.

The first thing to understand is that chances are your company culture is going to start to normalise with that of the acquiring company. Your snack cupboard, your weekly sponsored drinks, your masseuse. If the company that acquired you doesn’t do these things, eventually you won’t either. Think of it from the point of view of everyone else in the company: why should you special snow-flakes get better perks than everyone else?

Which is not to say that it doesn’t suck. It does.

And you may get special dispensation, but it will probably be time-limited.

And there’s another side: bigger companies often have better benefits. In most of the acquisitions I’ve been involved in, we’ve lost many of the day-to-day benefits (like a snack cupboard) but have gained others (improved healthcare, more generous pension contributions). There will also likely be adjustment to salaries, bonuses and job titles. In Europe, generally things have to be the same or better, but that’s not true everywhere and, even then, what’s “the same or better” might be subjective.

So far I’m mostly been talking about the monetary value of your perks, but there is more at stake here. It’s still worth fighting to keep as much of your culture as possible. The people make the company and that’s what they bought. Your culture is part of what they bought and part of the culture is the environment that you all work. If they trash everything the current team value without some balance, they won’t have bought very much.

There are elements of your culture that make you effective as an organisation and others that just lubricate the process a bit. You should fight more for the former than the latter. (That should be stating the obvious, but every acquisition I’ve been involved in has seen people practically crying over pretty small things.)

Example 1: getting rid of your bug tracking software because your acquiring company uses Excel for the same purpose makes no sense.

Example 2: maybe you love Gmail that your startup uses and, quite sensibly, hate Exchange that your acquiring company uses. I’m sorry. You’re going to lose Gmail. The hundred people being acquired are not going to change the mind of corporate IT of the fifty-thousand employee acquirer. (It could be worse. One of the companies that I moved to had Lotus Notes as their corporate standard.) Nor is there a good argument for keeping a different system from everyone else.

If you have obviously better tooling, fight for that. If they just use a different tool, you’re unlikely to win. If you use Slack and they use Teams, you’ll almost certainly be moving over. If you use Slack and they use Post It notes and shouting, it’s winnable.

There are, however, some vectors that are worth looking out for. If you have an awesome tool that there is no equivalent for in the new company, fight for that.

The other thing that’s worth pushing for is where the new company is open to new ideas. In one take-over, I successfully advocated for WebEx to become their new video conferencing standard (taking over from a terrible existing system that couldn’t be used to talk to clients!) at one company and then, ironically, advocated getting rid of the very same product in favour of a more modern solution in a later acquisition.

Overall, if you like your day-to-day job, very few of these things should be deal breakers, so pay attention to people who act like it’s the end of the world and try to talk them down. Equally, you are going to lose stuff that you like. It’s important to keep a level head and consider the overall picture.

# Depression

Then again, it could be death by a thousand cuts. All those small changes, many of them not for the better, can get you down.

Many bigger companies are not as generous with things like being able to work remotely or from home. These days, I would consider that a deal-breaker.

Some of the things that bothered me were kind of odd. Like the fact that I had to use the company travel service when visiting a client, but they’d aggressively booked the rack rate for most hotels; that they’d know so little about the cities I was visiting that they’d try to put me in the red-light district; or that you had to fly for international travel so I got into trouble for expensing a trip on the Eurostar to Paris.

These affected me personally very little, but I had to work much harder to get a worse level of service. And that’s ultimately why I left most of these companies after the acquisition.

I mention these simply as examples. The cuts that bother you will be different. Maybe there’ll be so few that you’ll stay. What I’m saying is, expect some but try not to pre-judge.

# Acceptance

I would urge you to stay, at least a little while, to see how things play out. There are benefits to working for a bigger company.

You might find it easier to move to another department, which might be good. There may be better promotion opportunities. Big companies often also have better perks and more formal structures for things like bonuses and raises. You might like the increased structure found in most large corporations.

Try to embrace the things you can’t change as best you can and remember that no job is perfect. The mix of things you like and things your merely endure will undoubtedly change but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Try to remember that it’s working with your colleagues (or whatever else) that really keeps you at work, not the various perks.

ZX81

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:47:44 +0800

Last week Apple launched a new low-cost laptop called the MacBook Neo. Much of the commentary about it focuses on the fact that it was built to a price and the compromises that entailed.

These commentators know nothing of compromise.

Let me tell you about the ZX81, the early eighties computer that inspired the name of this site¹.

Disappointed that the Neo has sRGB rather than P3 Wide Colour? How about two colours? Only 8Gb of memory. Could you manage with 1Kb? Dual speakers? How about no sound at all? A mechanical trackpad? What if pressing a key made the screen flicker?

These all sound like crazy limitations. Even in 1981, some were not happy with them. There were computers with colour, sound, reasonable (for the time) amounts of memory, and usable keyboards. But none of them were on sale for £69, or about £285 in 2026 money.

For context, the “low cost” Apple II could be bought for £549, or over £2000 in today’s money².

Sinclair really, really pushed for the low cost. The whole machine has four chips (many modern machines have more). You could get it even cheaper if you were prepared to assemble it yourself. The famous membrane keyboard was barely usable but worked. You used your TV rather than a monitor. A tape cassette instead of a disk drive.

But why go to these lengths? Did they go too far? In today’s money, it’s still half the cost of the MacBook Neo.

The thing to remember in 1981 is that no one knew what home computers were good for. There was no Internet. Packaged software was still a pretty new concept. Computers were The Future and you didn’t want to get left behind, but it wasn’t entirely clear what you’d be missing out on. They were educational, maybe fun. Ultimately, people wanted one… but didn’t really know why.

Very few people would be willing to speculate by spending over £2000 on an Apple II, but plenty – over 1.5 million – of people were willing to risk £300 on a ZX81. For many of these people, the alternative to a ZX81 wasn’t an Apple or VIC-20, it was no computer at all.

And despite the limitations, users managed to do amazing things. Someone wrote a working chess program. There’s a monster maze game. It’s fair to say that many Gen X developers started their careers on a ZX81. A more expensive machine would not have had the same impact.

I never had a ZX81. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the ZX81’s successor, a slightly less limited machine that was still very much designed to a price point. It was mocked by the kids with richer parents, but the quirks created by the cost cutting gave the machine a unique character.

None of this is true for Apple’s new laptop. Apple hasn’t changed. It’s more like the Apple II than the ZX81. You can get Chromebooks and cheap Windows laptops if you want to spend less; maybe they are junk, as Steve Jobs described them. In modern term, the ZX81 is more like a Raspberry Pi. A computer designed to a price, to get one into as many hands as possible. In that sense, it’s absolutely not junk. It was just designed with different goals.

I initially hoped to post this last week, when it would have been the same week as the Neo’s announcement and the forty-fifth anniversary of the ZX81’s launch. I missed. ↩︎
To be clear, I’m not saying that Apple should have priced the II at the same level as the ZX81. Jobs famously said that Apple were price-competitive but chose not to play in certain markets. ↩︎

Predicament

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:35:51 +0800

Another year, another William Boyd book [affiliate link]. I make that sound like a bad thing, but really it isn’t.

This one won’t go down as a classic, but it’s thoroughly entertaining and fast-paced, zipping between Guatemala, London and Berlin in the early sixties. It has the usual Boyd mix of well-researched historical details and character moments. He makes it seem effortless. Maybe it is easy for him now, having written so many novels, but it all works.

Restaurant At The End Of The Universe

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:30:14 +0800

I forgot this in my roundup of 2025, party because it’s not the first time I’ve read it, and partly because I read it at the very end of the year.

I reread some Douglas Adams every couple of years, and every time I come away impressed. I discover details or a clever turn of phrase that I’d missed previously. I almost expect to be disappointed but it hasn’t happened yet¹.

This is likely the first time I’ve read Restaurant as someone older than Adams² made it. It’s not an original observation that he died too young, but milestones like these hit you hard.

December was Hitchhiker’s Guide month for me. In addition to reading the second book, I went to see the “immersive theatre” version of the story. I had bought tickets a long time in advance and spent much of the time wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake. Were they just cashing in on Adams name and throngs of naive, deluded fans?

Nearer the time I learned that Sanjeev Bhaskar was voicing a Vogon and Tamsin Greig was the book. Both favourites in this household, my level of optimism increased.

Then I learned that Arvind Ethan David wrote the script. By no means a guarantee of success, but at least I knew he cared about the source material. That’s something.

The result was pretty good. Not quite like any of the existing versions, but then all of them are slightly different. The story tied together threads from the original works in new ways, and it largely worked. You didn’t need to have read the books but there were references that made more sense if you had.

The “immersive” aspect was mixed. In the first scene³, attendees milled around with the cast, which was fun. We spoke with Fenchurch. Massive case of esprit d’escallier afterwards, but the actors probably get sick of too-clever-by-half fans so maybe I just avoided making a fool of myself! We lost a little momentum moving from set to set, and there was one where a few things appeared to be going on at the same time and you were constantly wondering if you were missing something important.

I was slightly disappointed that we were the only people wearing dressing gowns, but there were a few people carrying towels.

In the end, it wasn’t a cheap afternoon but it was worth supporting. And the kids finally learned the source of many of my references.

Indeed, the kids were so impressed that when we had a road trip later in December, they – unprompted – requested that we play the radio show version rather than our usual mix of Just A Minute, Infinite Monkey Cage, and Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.

So not only did I read the second book and attend a live version of Hitchhikers, I listened to the first two phases⁴ of the radio series.

Many consider the radio show to be the best version of Hitchhikers. While I do waver, on most days I would agree. Again, it’s likely a few years since I listened to the whole thing, but it still works. There are few phrases that, maybe, you wouldn’t say any more. Adams was a twenty-something man in the late Seventies when he wrote it; I think a few minor transgressions my modern standards are acceptable and expected. And there’s nothing really bad, and much more that you might consider the seeds of the more explicitly humanist outlook we’d see as he got older.

It’s amazing to think that I’ve been enjoying the Hitchhikers Guide since first reading it in my teens, and it pleases me that new and younger audiences can get a kick out of it, too.

As a kid, I loved Red Dwarf. I watched the show, even read the books. A few years ago, it was back on TV and I excitedly put it on, ready to share this gem with my wife. Only… it just wasn’t funny. I’m not sure if it’s or me that it hasn’t aged well, but it was so disappointing. ↩︎
He died in 2001, aged 49. ↩︎
I’m deliberately keeping it vague for anyone who has not seen it. ↩︎
Each series if a “phase” and each episode is a “fit”. The first two phases were written by Adams (with John Lloyd’s help in a couple of fits), the rest were created after his death. ↩︎

Reading 2025

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:34:49 +0800

Eight books last year, against my target of twelve. By my historical standards, not bad! Four fiction and four non-fiction is not a bad split, either.

Unusually there were a couple of books that just weren’t for me. Not objectively bad, by any means, but it turns out that comic books are really not my thing. On the other hand, William Boyd continues to entertain, and Mick Herron’s books are as fun to read as watch.

I can’t remember the last time I hit my annual target but that’s not going to stop me from aiming for twelve books again in 2026. Wish my luck. If past form is any indication, I’ll need it.

Rejoice, Rejoice!

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 10:28:22 +0800

A few years ago, I read “Crisis? What crisis?”, which is about Britain in the 1970s. This is the follow-up book about the 1980s [affiliate link], though, as its author Alwyn W. Turner points out, the timelines are never quite that precise. It’s more accurate to say that this book follows Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in 1979 to her downfall eleven years later.

Despite living through the Eighties, there’s a surprising amount of this book that I have very little recollection of. It makes me realise how little of what’s going on now that my kids are likely to remember.

One of the great things about reading this is discovering how, despite claims to the contrary, history does repeat itself. The obvious example that we’ve recently (re)lived through is the left making Labour unelectable. The parallels between the post-Thatcher loss in 1979 and Corbyn’s rise as leader are depressingly similar¹. They embraced protest and opposition, and sabotaged their own chances of winning power. As the book concludes:

Had the labour party in 1981 chosen as its leader Denis Healy rather than Michael Foot, and the SDP not therefore been formed, the probability is that she would have served only one term, replaced by a centre-left government that would have reached an accommodation with the unions and never embarked upon the privatisation of state industries. Much of the damage done to socialism might actually be seen as the work of the Labour left, suffering from the loss of a sense of priorities.

Much of the narrative now is that Thatcher was inevitable and all-powerful, but the reality, according to this book, is that she got lucky. It’s not so much that she won than her opponents lost. There’s Labour’s longest suicide note in history² and the split resulting in multiple centre-left parties. She couldn’t have hoped for a more disorganised opposition³.

One of the great things about reading this is realising how far we’ve come. Absolutely not a solved problem, but the attitudes documented are genuinely shocking. Polls in the eighties showed a significant majority for the death penalty⁴ but against a smoking ban⁵. Disappointing, perhaps, but not entirely unexpected. But I was taken aback by what people openly said about gay rights, specifically related to AIDS. I had heard the phrase “gay plague” but I don’t remember anyone advocating for letting the whole community die (which people did). HIV was undoubtedly scary, but this was public and open hate speech against a minority group. Appalling. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that progress has been made.

So overall, a fascinating read. The writing is fine and it’s clearly structured. The decade is split into three chunks, and each section talks about a particular aspect, also roughly chronologically. Turner walks a fine line, trying not to make it a dull academic history but keeping largely factual – people have strong opinions about Thatcher and it would have been easy to pick a direction.

Not that anyone is particular inspired by Starmer, of course, but he did get Labour into power. ↩︎
Ironically, by the standards of modern manifestos, at 39-pages it wasn’t terribly long. ↩︎
I almost wrote “appeal” there, but I don’t think that’s true. Like Labour under Corbyn, there was a lot to like about many of the policies, there was just a big question mark over their ability to deliver it. ↩︎
I’m unsure what the current numbers are, but I suspect I might still be disappointed. ↩︎
A smoking ban didn’t happen in the UK until the late nineties. ↩︎

iPad Pro M5

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 10:04:15 +0800

I got a new iPad to replace my 2018 iPad Pro. Let me complain about it first.

It bothers me that it’s a computer, yet I can’t easily write my own software on it¹. Sure, there is Swift Playgrounds, but I don’t really want to use Swift. And even if I did, it’s not a proper IDE, it doesn’t support basic features like a debugger. It’s not 1985 any more. There are other languages (Pythonista looks good, though I’ve not tried it), but the vast array of languages that are available on Linux and on the Mac are missing.

In recent years I’ve done part of the Advent of Code, and each time I pick a different language². At best, an iPad limits my options. Maybe my best choice is to ssh into a Raspberry Pi, but that seems like a crazy limitation for a £1000+ computer.

And then there’s the £1000+ part. When iPad first came out, people were genuinely surprised with the £499 price tag. Rumours were that the launch price would be double that. Yes, there are iPads much cheaper than the Pro, but I’ve been spoiled.

By “spoiled,” I mean that I’ve had Face ID to authenticate me since 2018, and I don’t want to go back. Would an iPad Air do everything I need? Almost certainly. Honestly, the iPad would do the trick most of the time. But neither of those has Face ID.

As much as it has advanced, I would not consider everything on the new model to be an upgrade. What I like about the original Smart Folio was that it was a good enough keyboard that also served as a case and was fairly light. The new keyboard is great – a real laptop feel – but is heavy. I don’t want to lug it around everywhere.

In summary, despite being expensive, it’s surprisingly limited and requires a bunch of pricey “add ons” to make it functional.

Yet, despite all that I still love my iPad. I can’t competently explain why. It’s not entirely rational.

There’s something about picking up a thin slab of glass and interacting with it using your fingers that feels intuitive and like the future.

Compared with my 2018 model, there’s not much to note. The specs are better, sure. The software is vastly improved³. It’s still well made with a beautiful screen.

But that’s not what makes the iPad compelling. It’s some ineffable niceness. Whether I’m reading the web, books or magazine, triaging email or writing blogs, the iPad is just… pleasant to use. The hardware keeps out of the way quite unlike a laptop or desktop machine.

I can’t say it’s worth the money. I can’t run you through a feature checklist or point to any objective metrics. I could check my email or surf the web on a Chromebook for a fraction of the price. I just don’t want to. That makes me super-privileged but also pretty happy with my purchase.

Even writing software for it is more involved than you’d like. For personal use it still needs you to juggle various certificates. ↩︎
What can I say: I’m a sucker for punishment. ↩︎
That line sells it short. iPadOS 26, with its proper multitasking, makes it dramatically more useful. It ran on my old iPad but it’s useful on my 2025 model. ↩︎

Slow Horses

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:04:15 +0800

I am late to the party. I’m not a purist who is going to tell you that the books are way better than the TV series, that I read the books when they first came out. Well actually, before they came out because I know somebody who knows somebody.

No. I watched the “Slow Horses” show on Apple TV+, enjoyed it, and belatedly thought that I should read the book [affiliate link] to see how similar they are.

Pretty similar, it turns out.

The “slow horses” are MI5 failures, where they put people who make big mistakes, hoping they’ll quit rather than have to be sacked. They’re a mis-matched and idiosyncratic group and – it’s barely a spoiler to say – they’re maybe not as useless as we’d been led to believe. The plot involves a terrorist plan and lots of twists and turns.

It took me a little while to get into the writing. It’s not bad, just different to what I’ve been reading recently. But after that, it was a fun read. As you might expect, it’s a bit of a page turner.

What surprised me is how close it is to the TV version. Sure, the characters are not exactly the same but they’re pretty close. You can imagine the characters reading some of the lines. This is partly because the book is written in a world where people are used to shows like Slow Horses. It’s not exactly a script, but some parts are structured how you’d do it on screen. The actors are also great, demonstrating great, well, acting and casting.

The book comes to a largely satisfying end… and then keeps going for another chapter, setting up the books that follow. There’s a saying in selling: “don’t talk past the sale.” But that’s a minor criticism in an otherwise entertaining read.

Thirty Years

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 10:32:00 +0800

I’ve lived in London for thirty years¹. Somehow.

I’m not entirely sure how it happened. It was never the plan. Not that I had a plan. If you’d asked me where I wanted to live, I probably wouldn’t have picked London.

I applied to a handful of jobs at the tail-end of my stint at university². The one job offer I received³ was in London. That’s how it started.

To give you an idea of how arbitrary it all was: my first employer had offices in central London and in Surrey. I looked at the train lines and found that Wimbledon was about half way between the two. That’s where I ended up.

I didn’t have a plan much beyond that. If anyone had asked, I might have suggested staying for a year or two before heading back north.

Instead, I stayed.

A colleague recently asked why, and I’m not sure that I had a great answer. Sure, there’s an element of inertia and the complexity of uprooting the entire family. And undoubtedly there’s a degree of romanticism, the idea of London rather than the reality⁴.

But there really is something of everything here. It’s one of the few, genuinely “world” cities. There are people, languages, culture and food from everywhere⁵. Before remote work became feasible, it was the best place in the UK, probably all of Europe, to find the kind of work I’m qualified to do.

It’s expensive and busy and polluted, so there’s undoubtedly a cost. I know I’m fortunate and I’m not pretending it’s for everyone, but, consciously or not, it’s a trade-off that I’m still happy with.

I don’t have a record of the exact date. I know my job started early October and I overly optimistically gave myself a couple of weeks to find somewhere to live. ↩︎
Hubris in some aspects of my life has been a constant. ↩︎
My hubris has not always been warranted. ↩︎
I remember when I first arrived here, Oxford Street was amazing. These days it seems more than a little stale and sad. Time and internet shopping have not been kind. ↩︎
Like pretty much everyone that lives here, I don’t experience it as much as I would like. But it’s right there and I love that. ↩︎

Process as Investment

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:13:05 +0800

For my first job after university, I worked for a company with a ISO9001 certification. This meant that every project had a complete, documented process for every aspect, from reporting, to finance, to bug tracking, to code formatting.

There was even a team whose sole job was to define the template standards and enforce them across all projects. Most people thought they were busy-bodies, meddling with things they didn’t understand. While the team was staffed by people who had started doing project work, most had not done any for years.

What I’m saying is that formal process was thoroughly embedded in the organisation. Most people merely tolerated it, with many actively disliking it.

After a few years, I figured out a hack. Even as a relatively junior team member, I could dictate how code was written and tested. All I had to do is start on the project early, and write the standards documentation.

You might think that they wouldn’t leave an inexperienced person like me to do that, but if there’s one thing worse than having to read a standards document, it’s writing it. I like to think that I did a pretty good job, but my objective was to end any debate on subjects such as tabs versus spaces, where to put braces, and source control conventions. It worked!

I realised that I liked process, but mostly when I was defining it. Following other people’s process can be painful.

I belatedly realised that I was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. It’s not that it has to be my way. It’s not that all process is bad. I’m arguing against bad process¹.

I like this definition of process:

Process is the investment we make in inefficiency now to prevent errors from costing us later.

Code indentation styles we don’t like, and code reviews, and weird ways of working with git slow us down. That’s why 10x developers don’t bother with those niceties.

But if you think of process as an investment, then those 10x developers no longer seem so productive. Sometimes process is there for the sake of having process. Those people in the Quality team at my first job were often inadvertently arguing in favour of that. But it’s a trade-off and it’s important to understand why it’s there.

Yeah, no one argues in favour of bad process. I totally destroyed that straw man. ↩︎

A History of the World in 47 Borders

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 11:22:30 +0800

I hear John Elledge a lot on podcasts, so when his new book came out I was immediately interested. I saw it in a bookstore, almost bought it, and then realised that I have more than enough books at home. (Un)fortunately, Amazon were selling it cheap and I caved.

The good news is that “A History of the World in 47 Borders”¹ is an entertaining read. No regrets.

It’s well researched, and full of interesting tidbits, and connecting historical events in logical ways. What stood out for me, though, was the writing. It’s informal, and you get his voice and personality in practically every sentence. Here are a few.

About Korea:

until the entertainingly named Wang Kén managed to unify the lot

Switzerland:

Switzerland, though: what the hell?

Australia:

Instead, their history begins with (this’ll shock you) the British

As a general point, if you’re the kind of person who wants to see more Saint George Cross flags everywhere, you might not be happy with, well, our history. Can’t really blame Elledge for that.

And in the conclusion:

The idea of a world without borders, where people are as free to move as money, is an attractive one, but the last person who seemed to think he had a plan to create it was John Lennon, and look what happened to him.

If you’re looking for a serious, academic read, this is not it. And that’s no bad thing.

Coincidentally, while I was reading this book, I also listened to a 99 Percent Invisible podcast about borders.

Affiliate link ↩︎

Migrating to FreshRSS

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:49:53 +0800

I’ve gone through a number of RSS clients over the years. I used to be a big Google Reader user. I used Reeder on my iPad a lot, and now I use NetNewsWire. To ensure that my feeds are shared between devices, I’ve used Feedly. I’ve paid for it, as I use it a lot and I don’t want it to go away like Google Reader did.

But they keep adding stuff that I have no interest in, including jumping on the AI bandwagon. It has, however, been fast and reliable. I don’t have much to complain about.

But there’s always some new toy to play around with, and I decided I wanted to play around with a self-hosted aggregator. FreshRSS works with NetNewsWire, it has a good feature set, and, by web app standards, is pretty easy to install.

There were a few non-obvious points, though, so I thought I would share a few notes.

The obviously problem with self-hosting is that you need somewhere to host it! Firing up an EC2 instance, even a small one, could easily end up costing more than an annual subscription to Feedly. I always have a bunch of Raspberry Pi’s floating around, but how would I access them when I’m out of the house?

VPNs are all well and good, but they’re often fussy or fragile or difficult to maintain, or require cooperation from your WiFi router. I don’t have the patience. However, there is another option: Tailscale. It’s like a VPN mesh, allowing your various devices to talk to one another. I add the client to my Pi 5, iPad and iPhone, and they can all connect with known host names wherever they are.

Installation is pretty simple. The tricky part is adding the right software to the Pi’s OS, but the installation page tells you exactly what it can and cannot find. Once the right dependencies are installed, it ran first time.

The next trick: access to the API – which is how NetNewsWire communicates with it – is disabled by default. You need to play around with the settings to get going.

And finally, the big gotcha. If you follow all the instructions and import your feeds, you’ll get a fully functional system. But, it will never automatically refresh your feeds! (There’s a Refresh button in the web UI, but if, like me, you always use it from an app, it will quickly get stale.) The steps are documented but is a challenge if you’re not expecting to look for them!

And that’s it. I now have an operational, self-hosted instance of FreshRSS. My Feedly subscription still has a few months left, so I’m not decided whether to switch fully, but it’s nice to have the option.

Why use RSS?

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 10:14:37 +0800

In a world where everything is owned by a gargantuan commercial entity, RSS is subversive, an act of rebellion. It harks back to the early days of the Internet where freedom and open standards were the future, rather than Big Data, Big Tech, and Big Lock-in.

RSS is a newsfeed than you define. You subscribe to websites and they give you a list of stories to read. How is that different from social media?

It’s decentralised. There is no Facebook or X of RSS. Google Reader used to be the big fish, but it wasn’t big enough for Google and they killed it over a decade ago. Even then, it wasn’t the only game in town.

It’s difficult to track. Ad tech is central to the web, sadly. Everything you do is recorded and stashed away so you can be shown ever more personalised advertising. Or at least so they can show you the same three coffee machines that you rejected when you bought a different one last week. That’s not completely eliminated with an RSS feed, but part of the reason that it’s quick and easy is there is a lot less tracking and advertising.

There is no lock-in. There are dozens of different ways to read your RSS feed. There are web clients and software for your desktop computer, your tablet and your phone. There’s a standard format, called OPML, that you can use to import and export your feeds. So if you’re using, say, Feedly and you want to move to, say, FreshRSS, there is really only inertia keeping you.

You can use the same interface for all your feeds. I read Ars Technica and The Verge and some Substack newsletters, all with the same interface. I subscribe to dozens of smaller sites, some who only publish a few times a month, and I don’t have to remember to visit – new stories just appear in my feed, ready to read.

I dip in when I have a few minutes to spare. I typically find it a better use of my time than social media. Though, of course, I spend more time there than I should, too.

I don’t know of anyone else who uses an RSS reader, but I think they should be a lot more popular. This is my small attempt at some advocacy!

Corporate Engineers

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:48:09 +0800

Brent Simmons:

I had a bias about engineers that worked for large corporations. I assumed that they weren’t as good as indies and engineers at small companies

I work for a small company and my clients are usually big companies, so I have some perspective here¹.

From my experience, the difference between working for large and small companies is bureaucracy and focus. A tolerance or affinity for these things means that the people attracted to each are different. Normally when we talk about “bureaucracy,” it’s a pejorative, but that’s not what I mean here. Larger companies need more formal process to function. We can save the argument about good or bad process for another time.

Competence is orthogonal to both bureaucracy and focus. It’s not about one being good and the other bad. I would suspect that it’s easier to hide at a bigger company. But, on the other hand, larger companies often have processes and procedures for managing poor performance. Maybe it averages out?

But the impression of a lack of competence of corporate engineers is often just that: an impression.

Corporates have more people, which means there’s more communication and more process. And more people inevitably means that each individual is responsible for a smaller slice of the pie. Contrast with an indie developer who is responsible for the whole.

This means that when you ask a corporate developer a question, the person you’re talking to quite possibly doesn’t know the answer! What you’re asking is about another part of the system that they’ve spent no time on.

If you’re from a small company, that looks like incompetence. But it’s really just a consequence of the scale.

It’s a form of adaptation or preference. The way you get things done differs between big and small companies.

At a small company, I might just be able to do something, or I’ll know exactly who to ask. At a big company, it might take some time to figure out who is even responsible.

When I interview engineers who have worked mostly for large companies, it’s not their technical skills that fall short. Instead, it’s their ability to Get Things Done. Because larger companies typically have processes and teams in place to do the more mundane aspects, often they’ve not even thought about how it works behind the scenes.

Just feed the data in from Kafka? Sure, how are you going to set up Kafka? What’s the best practice for using this particular feature? Good question! No, it’s not in the documentation. How are you going to figure it out? There’s no proscribed process, no one officially in charge of that.

Ultimately, it comes down to preference. Do you want to know a little about a lot of things, or a lot about a few things? Neither is objectively the “right” choice. Myself, I like to get involved in things outside my little pigeonhole. When I’ve worked at larger companies (typically through an acquisition) I’ve felt frustrated by the “it’s not your concern” responses when I’ve brushed up against other teams. I know my preference.

But I don’t like to underestimate “corporate” developers. They’re usually good but just have different preferences.

Yeah, it’s taken me a while to write it down! ↩︎

The Bystander Effect

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:19:48 +0800

Some of the clients I work with have a very collaborative culture. Decisions are always run past all interested parties and buy-in is required from everyone.

The people in charge set the general direction but not how to do it.

I prefer to work for (and with) companies that are like that because, well, my opinion counts! Having the people who know the work the best make the decisions makes the most sense. People appreciate the autonomy and the trust that management place in them.

If there’s a downside it’s that these cultures can suffer from something like the Bystander Effect. If you’re not familiar with it, the idea is that if you have an accident in a busy area, you’re much less likely to get the help you need than if you have the same accident when there’s only one other person near by. In a crowd, we can reasonably assume that someone else will step in. If we’re the only person near by, there is no ambiguity.

Hopefully you’re not regularly having accidents at work!

There are always going to be bugs and challenges implementing changes. So you send an email to the team, identifying the problem. Everyone reads it, acknowledges it, and assumes that someone else will intervene. I might know something about it, but – surely – someone else knows more than me.

It’s not a conscious thing. No one deliberately waits for someone else to step in. But that’s what happens. Everyone is busy, so you don’t press the issue immediately. Maybe you don’t get around to mentioning it in the next team meeting.

Before you know it, two weeks have passed and you’ve not got a response, much less an answer.

The challenge is noticing that this is what’s happening.

The temptation is to keep asking the team. Emailing reminders, asking generally in the team meeting. These might work eventually.

Once you notice, the solution is actually pretty easy, and it’s the same as for the Bystander Effect. Rather than ask people for an answer, ask an individual. If you have an accident in a crowd, ask for help from the guy with a black hair, a beard, blue jeans and a red t-shirt, yes, you. Similarly, in these collaborative environments, ask the most likely individual. They might not know the answer, but they will know who does, or at least where to go next.

The Caledonian Gambit

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 10:04:24 +0800

I’ve read a lot of Moren’s words over the years, but mostly in Macworld and Six Colors¹. I picked “The Caledonian Gambit²” entirely arbitrarily.

His fiction is… fine. It’s a bit too military to my taste, but with a bunch of spy and action for good measure. There’s some family backstory that feeds into it, leading to a well rounded story. It didn’t fully engage me but I did keep reading, and wanted to know how it ended. There were a few phrases where I thought “he’s trying too hard” but, otherwise, it’s well written.

In summary, there’s nothing wrong with it. It just wasn’t for me. Sorry, Dan.

I also read a couple of his short stories a few years ago. ↩︎
Affiliate link. ↩︎

No Longer on Twitter

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 10:10:15 +0800

I talked about what it would take for me to leave Twitter a couple of years ago, but never followed up when I did leave around a year later. So here we go.

I didn’t quit in one go. I stopped posting. I checked in on my feed less frequently. I switched my account to private. I didn’t go cold turkey, I simply found fewer reasons to return.

I’d like to say that I was high minded and principled, that I quit because of Musk and Nazis and hateful content. But the truth is that the people I followed and blocked meant that my feed was mostly hate-free, an odd mixture of geeky stuff and dad jokes. Though I did leave because of the people and the content.

Twitter has never been a read-only medium for me. It’s all about the interactions, so when my community left, it was only a matter of time for me.

None of this is particularly original or unusual. I wanted to write something about my journey because I got a huge amount of value out of Twitter over the years.

There are people on there I’ve “known” for over a decade. Some I’ve ended up meeting in real life. Some I know almost nothing about, but I enjoy reading their words. A couple have died, and their loss has affected me in ways that I couldn’t have predicted.

What I’m saying is that closing my Twitter account was a strangely emotional activity. I left the account dormant for too long, willing things to get better even though rationally I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

Sadly, Twitter isn’t Twitter any more. Actually terminating my account was difficult but I can’t say I’ve missed it now that my account has gone. After all the build up, after all the time I spent on Twitter over the year, that’s both sad and surprising. Nothing is forever.

Notes Nintendo Switch 2

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:09:57 +0800

I wrote my initial thoughts about the Switch 2 announcement a couple of months ago. Against my better judgement, I pre-ordered one. What follows are a few thoughts about it now that I’ve had my hands on one for a couple of weeks.

The best summary I can think of for my initial impressions is: consider the name. The +1 label neatly captures both the good and the bad. It’s a better Switch. Faster. Higher resolution graphics. Generally… just nicer. It’s not a game changer (pardon the pun), but not everything needs to be revolutionary. Nicer is good.

It fixes many of the issues of the original. It feels more sturdy, the kick-stand is more solid, the Joy-Cons have a solid “click” as they magnetically connect to the main unit, and the wrist straps attach and detach more easily than on the OG.

Eight years later, as you’d expect, all the tech-specs are improved. Faster processor, more memory, higher capacity storage. Practically, it now outputs 4K to a TV and is HD on the (also nicer) built-in screen. I don’t really care about the numbers, but I will say that Mario Kart World looks good!

The hardware seems to be up to the task, though the first time we tried Mario Kart World with three players while docked, it was quite glitchy when the race started. Not that the frame rate was reduced, but it seemed quite variable. After maybe thirty seconds, everything was fine again. Hopefully a one-off.

That race was with the Switch 2 joy-cons plus some from the original Switch. Pairing controllers from the original Switch isn’t entirely intuitive. It does work but it’s not entirely clear how you’re supposed to do it. Or I do know and it takes longer than you’d expect. Either way, not as slick as you’d hope for.

But when you do get it going… well, no complaints. Mario Kart is probably my favourite game on the OG Switch, and I’m loving Mario Kart World so far. So much so that I’ve not tried any of my older Switch games on the new machine!

There are lots of familiar elements and a surprising number of differences. Having twice as many karts (twenty four instead of twelve) does make it feel different – more chaotic – which people (anecdotally¹) react negatively towards initially but quickly warm to.

Another change are the characters and karts. I’ve raced with the same avatar for ages and having to change was a shock to the system. I am now happy racing as the Cow, though.

What am I saying? It’s fun. It’s an evolution. If you thought the Switch was a toy and you like playing proper games on a PlayStation, you’re not going to be won over by the Switch 2. If you own and like the Switch, do you need a Switch 2? Also no. At least not yet.

Despite the Switch 2 being the fastest selling console of all time, you really don’t need one right now. There’s no shame in waiting until there’s more software.

But it’s never all about being rational. I’m happy with my purchase.

Sample size of four. Not statistically significant. Use this data with caution. ↩︎

Process

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 10:30:12 +0800

In this piece, Seth Godin argues that understanding something is better than just memorising a process. Understanding is certainly key, but I think that misses something: there is value to in steps.

True, if you slavishly follow the steps, you can’t adapt. But if you don’t document the steps, it’s easy to miss one and get yourself into trouble. The challenge is knowing when to follow the steps and when to improvise.

My favourite example of where I do this is when preparing to deliver a training course. I’ve done it often enough that I know the process. But it’s so complicated that it’s easy to forget a step. By defining the steps, I can be sure to follow best practice¹. It’s less stress for me and gives a better service to customers. As a side effect, it also looks more slick – people do notice and it, correctly, gives the impression both that you’ve done this before and you know what you’re doing.

In short, understanding is key, but don’t undervalue recording the steps.

I hate the phrase “best practice” because it’s never best. It’s a baseline level of quality. But that’s exactly what I’m trying to advocate here. Having the steps written means you to deviate from the norm safe in the knowledge that you’re not missing anything. ↩︎