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Read about my journey as a senior software engineer, looking at the importance of understanding people and managing time wisely.

I got this reggae compilation when it was released in 1979. It was then, and remains, the best double album compilation introduction to the richness, and sweetness, of Jamaician reggae. It was compiled by David Headley from the Trojan back catalogue. Some of these tracks have haunted me for decades, and there is not a clunker on the album. Listen to Little Roy's Hard Fighter and Bob Andy's You don't …

Crossness Pumping Station is one of those amazing places that are always worth revisiting. It looks pretty snazzy outside, but inside will consistently take your breath away. And it was designed to do so – even if its purpose was pumping sewage. Victorian London had a sewage problem. As the city and its population grew and grew, removing ‘night soil’ became more and more of a challenge. ‘Solutions’ included dumping …

Back in 2014 I published the first edition of my Rudy Van Gelder Collector’s Discography. That version focused on albums I was interested in collecting at the time and didn’t contain any albums recorded after 1965. In 2020 I gave the discography a minor update, adding some smaller independent labels as well as ... More→

DEBATE TRANSCRIPT: Jake Tapper: Welcome to the CNN Presidential Debate. I’m Jake Tapper. Dana Bash: And I’m Dana Bash. Let’s get started. Tapper: We’ll begin with the economy. President Biden, since you took office, inflation has slowed but prices remain high. What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump? Biden: Look at what Mr. Trump left me …

Excuse the corny title and associated video but I couldn’t resist it. What3Words’s accounts for 2023 have just been published and the cynics who have doubted W3W’s commercial model were confounded by the outstanding progress that the company has made in 2023. Here are a few highlights to save you reading through 45 pages. Revenues surged by 28% to break through the £1m barrier for the first time Employee numbers …

Yesterday, I announced the release of the Theme Machine, a tool for generating custom palettes as CSS custom properties. I hope this tool proves useful for many developers, but it’s really only the first step in managing color in CSS. I think it’s worth stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of custom property management in general. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably tried a handful of different …

Imagen generada con Dall-e 3 La semana pasada, exactamente el 16 de junio, fue el 18º aniversario de Ikkaro. En estos 18 años he visto evolucionar la blogosfera, las redes sociales e Internet en general. Lo que veo no me gusta, todo parece haberse desvirtuado y no se cumple ninguna de las expectativas que teníamos de la WWW. Pero echamos un vistazo al pasado y al presente y no hace …

In trans children’s healthcare there is so much intentionally bad science, so much science that fundamentally misunderstands (or chooses to misrepresent) trans experiences. The quantity of bad science overwhelms – we challenge some, whilst other pieces of bad science slip through undetected. I just this morning had my attention drawn to some fundamentally bad science (I read about it on the website transfemscience https://transfemscience.org/articles/puberty-blockers/ ) and realised that yet another …

NB: This is a version of a paper given at the The Good Place: Welcome, everything is Fine Conference on 14 June. Comedy-drama The Good Place (NBC, 2016-2020) features a variety of existential and philosophical debates as part of its premise. For those unfamiliar with the series, it follows four people who have died and find themselves in what they initially thought was ‘the good place’ but… Source

My 2018 12.9 iPad Pro has been one of my greatest tech purchases. I’ve used it nearly every day for the last 5.5 years, and it’s still in great shape. Why upgrade now? While I’m not an artist, I love my Apple Pencil for taking notes, sketching my thoughts, and drawing; andwhen I tried the Apple Pencil Pro in a store the other day, I really liked the new squeeze …

Imagine you’ve set up a shiny new crowdsourcing project. How do you let people who might potentially want to volunteer online know about it? Here’s how we did it for one of our final crowdsourcing projects on Living with Machines. We called it the ‘language of mechanisation‘ internally, but you might have seen them as […]

Jhanas – a series of altered mental states that are accessed via concentration – are often described as an “advanced meditation practice,” a phrase that suggests that one must be a skilled meditator to access them: just as only a skilled outdoorsman would embark upon an expedition to the Arctic Circle. It implies that meditation exists on a spectrum of difficulty, with perhaps mindfulness apps like Calm and Headspace on …

Kobo Nia (left) and Pocketbook Basic Lux 4 (right) E-readers are lighter and more portable than a stack of paperbacks and offer a library’s worth of choices at your fingertips. While I adore the convenience, I’m increasingly squeamish about the idea of big corporations tracking every action. I crave the ease of digital books, but not at the expense of the privacy a physical book offers. This struggle sent me …

The Golden Rule of Game Promotion: No One Cares About Your Game (YouTube) Thomas Reisenegger gives a fascinating and actionable overview of how to think about marketing indie games. Some principles are timeless; others are targeted to the current social media landscape. My favorite insight (and one that has frustrated me when it isn’t followed) is that all your marketing should “work for the newcomers”. It’s important to remember that …