I have never worked with a software developer who enjoyed writing their quarterly or annual objectives. Most had been previously burned out by laborious processes which either meant two objectives take hours to write, or they’re easy to write but vague enough that they take hours to evidence every 3 months. In some cases they’ve even had objectives in which they had no say because they w...

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I don’t do resolutions, but I have changed how I approach something at work for this year, and so I guess that counts, right? I now have regular blocks of time in my calendar marked out as “Busy. Any meetings added in this time will be declined.”. This was after I realised I had multiple days in a week where in 7 hours I was doing a dozen or more meetings and was feeling totally burnt ou...

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Welcome to space year 2021! A bumper issue this week because I missed last week due to *gestures all around* all this. Our favourite Christmas presents were an Entry Grade Gundam, a plush narwhal and a burrito blanket. We watched the

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I have (nearly) finished the main story mode of Star Wars: Squadrons, which is short, but satisfyingly so, and I’ll definitely give the earlier levels another try. It really wants you to play online though (of the 48 trophies on the PS4 version, only 17 can be completed in single player and some of those are pretty t...

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Matt Jukes has written a post called Don’t do Agile. Be agile. Or something. where he describes how estimating stories has not worked for them at the Office of National Statistics. I think there is a more important...

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So, despite my sterling attempt to delude myself last year it’s been years since I’ve been a developer rather than a manager, and it was about the time of this change in my role that this blog started to die out. All I have now are opinions and guidance, which the internet is far too full of for me to want to add to (plus I am stil...

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In my last appraisal at work I got asked what I thought makes a good developer. I didn’t give a very good answer, mumbling something about keeping up with current developments, reading around the subject, always trying to improve themselves, comparing yourself to other people and so on. It turns out that in the last few weeks some people have attempted to answer this question for me....

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With wxVenus, I wanted to set up a public butracker. I wanted to avoid Google Code because of my recent account problems. At a previous company we used FogBUGZ and the deve...

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We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. I tried to write a comment on Steve’s blog about this but I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t equate to “no, you’re just years behind everyone else”.

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