Motorcycle training

I’ve had my motorcycle license since I was in university but have recently been sharpening my skills with training from riderskills.co.nz with a view to obtaining my unrestricted license and possibly re-entering the world of motorcycle owners. Simultaneously I’ve been keeping my eye out for the kind of bike I might like to purchase and [...]

Baby turns one

It’s about time for a new blog post and this one is short and sweet. William turned one recently and he is truly a delight always. Here we went for a walk and picked some wild flowers. This slightly blurry selfie is evidence us boys were safe and having fun while Mum was out.

Microsoft Certified Azure Expert

This year as one of my professional development goals I set out to earn the Microsoft Certified Azure Solution Architect Expert qualification. I started early in the year, booking the first of two exams in April. The second was in August and I am now certified as an Azure Solution Architect. The courses were interesting [...]

Software Quality

Today I was again researching software quality for an internal presentation and came across some ideas from Martin Fowler I found interesting. The first was from the video keynote Making Architecture Matter to OSCON in 2015. In it he explains that developer’s notions of using moral grounds for spending time to improve the maintainability of [...]

Open Source Primer

Want to get to know about Open Source Software licensing? Thinking that you might like to use OSS in your business? I recently wrote a white-paper for my employer on just that topic. The target audience for the article is non-technical, and it is not specifically for contributors to open source. It does however cover [...]

Life under lockdown

Level 4 lockdown in New Zealand will end a minute before midnight on Monday April 27, 2020. As I write this we have been in lockdown for nearly four weeks. It’s been okay for me, and I think also for my family, but I certainly acknowledge we have fewer challenges than many. In lockdown I’ve [...]

Videos you might like

Continuing in the spirit of recommending things I both enjoyed and found valuable, here’s some freely available videos that you might enjoy. Moral Philosophy Ever wondered what’s the right thing to do? You probably have given many philosophical questions are ubiquitous and we live them often. If you’ve never thought to enquire in to ethics [...]

Books you might like

It’s been a while since I posted any recommendations and over summer I read a bunch of good books, so here goes! Team Geek 2012 by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman Great book about team dynamics and software culture, written by a couple Xooglers and based on learnings from a series of popular presentations [...]

Life changes, new baby

If you look closely at my blogging history, you’ll see that I try and post something about once a month. You might also notice a wee gap from about July through to November this year. Well that can be explained by the new addition to our family, my first son, Will. He is the light [...]

Musing on software quality

Software quality is important to me. I think about it a lot. I think about it when I’m estimating, when I’m coding and sometimes when I’m at home too. Today I was thinking about software quality on a run and an interesting thing occurred to me, that is when we set a target for quality, [...]