Have we become subjugated by both our tools and the seemingly endless layers of management? If you haven’t come across the Transvaluation of Values then perhaps it’s time, as a progressive software engineer wishing to progress to the higher and more valuable ranks in the Grand Game, that you cast…

From the horse’s mouth — why it’s so much better to work remotely. For the purposes of this narrative I’ll just say up front that, despite what HR says, hybrid work is also remote work. Now, to the plot. Humans Can Be Islands Although HR generally touts social isolation as being detrimental to an…

Sometimes it’s nice to speak to someone in their own language. It is often said that one should continuously adapt the way in which one communicates depending upon to whom you are communicating in order to achieve maximum effect. Unfortunately, despite the plethora of eye-wateringly expensive and attractively named management…

Long term inmates forget there’s a world outside of corporate life. I wrote recently about how easy it is to fall into the trap of becoming what I like to call a “Company Fixture” — someone who, for one reason or another, has been at a company for so long…

When you look up and find yourself inadvertently in its fearsome gaze! Do you remember the original 8-bit game The Sentinel¹? If you’re a progressive software engineer, IT aficionado, or just living in a data centre and can’t find your way out, and are of a certain age having spent…

The software engineering market is nowhere near as bad as the new sites would have you believe. The bigger tech companies are all over the news, once again, but this time with their firings, hiring freezes, and their predictably urgent “need to insure profitability” (though their balance sheets, of course…

Or rather, “How someone can easily judge you in just 2 lines of text.” If you cast your eyes over a random person’s Twitter profile¹ you can get an instant insight into how that person wishes to define themselves to the outside word, or conversely see that they just doesn’t…

Addressing morale is the fundamental thing your management should be doing. You can talk¹ about bad management, idiot development methodologies, suffocating over-engineered processes, and box ticking busywork (and I frequently do in many of my articles) but the fundamental thing in the Grand Game of Software Engineering is to keep…

A future intelligence practicing security through quantum obscurity? Over the past several years there’s been a great deal of thought, discussion, and sometimes even heated debate around the possibility of us¹ existing in a simulation. I’ve touched on a few different possibilities myself in previous articles — it’s an interesting…