Alumni Blogs

I always need a diagram to understand something. Sometimes I make the diagrams. For those, sometimes I’m the leader in the field, but more often I’m trying to make them for myself to understand something that pre-existed.

Food Pyramid

US Dept of Agriculture’s Food Pyramid (1992 to 2005):

USDA “My Pyramid” (2011)

So the newer one is garbage, as it conveys no simple idea. As it happens the old one was simple but not the best nutritional advice, so an upgrade was needed according to the USDA. The pyramid metaphor was powerful, so the new one had to fit that…

A high-throughput team in Git is going to commit & push often, and teammates are going to need to code review as changes come in. Well, they do if they want to prevent the accumulation of tech debt, latent defects, standards avoidance, etc. When at ThoughtWorks I was placed at Google in the Test Mercenaries team up to the start of 2009, so I’ve some perspectives that are ten years out of date now, but I’ll give it a go of trying to detail the experience differences. Google’s setup was a couple of years established internally before GitHub launched with…

Synopsis: Git is the best we have right now for a “History-retaining Merkle tree” (when force-push is turned off), and stands to be utilized more outside of software development - in business at least.

A £200m “Garden Bridge” project was canceled when it had accrued £50m in costs and before construction started. It is difficult to pick it apart. See this Tortoise Media article and Reddit discussion.

It is not clear whether governments or corporate shareholders would be first to require “minutes” and proceedings to be better stored for posterity (and audit), but both will in time. I’m 100%…

If you’re trying to promote/sell some software thing it’s best to have examples inside the “5-second rule” experience. The 5-second rule iis where people land on your article/page, scroll up and down quickly, see no examples and then hit the back button.

Some/many will do that because they’re example-orientated. That as opposed to tutorial, api-doc, or buying ideas from rant-style text. The more experienced developers get, the more likely they are to leave tutorial and api-doc as a way of gaining knowledge of a thing, and more toward examples.

And even if they shift towards ‘examples’ as a way…