How not to overwhelm your team with meaningless work. Oh, the old tactical work versus strategic work dilemma. How much do you want to impact your short-term value in favour of the long-term? Your organisation should set this at the top level. Your mission statement could answer most questions in

Not the Ark > If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats onboard, how old is the ship's captain? This question did the rounds about 4 years ago. It was on a test in China aimed at 10 to 11 year olds. The internet had a field

When Shadow IT has some value > Get all the data you need from the database — all of it — and then some more They kept popping up like whack a mole. These Microsoft Access databases were everywhere. My boss at the time would get numerous calls to fix broken queries

PHP Facebook login in 2022 This is primarily my experience of going through this article here: https://medium.com/@Alabuja/social-login-in-laravel-with-socialite-90dbf14ee0ab If Socialite is new to you, then go through the article above, but come back here often. I’ve got login working for Socialite before, but I’m wondering

Agile — Re-doing work isn’t a bad thing > Sometimes you’ll have to rework things, that’s fine. My son needed a new bed, the old one no longer suited his needs. Simple enough, a bed was bought and we spent a few days (his room is quite rammed

How do you use the expedite swim lane? > “There needs to be best efforts to get this done ASAP” Taking my son to school today was painful. We need to drive and park in the car park so that I can get his wheelchair out. Cars were queuing out

When developers need to know some marketing > If you search for Goats, you’ll get adverts for Goats and not Orange Bins. As a hardcore developer I used to shun all this marketing stuff. I’d put it in a rusty bucket with people that do Business Studies at

> Please donate When I sit down to write I try and think of something interesting and different that I can link to software development. In this case, while there are parallels, and you may wish to transpose some of these thoughts onto software development, I would be doing the

Is your Marketing and Tech aligned? > “If it was a real mouse, it wouldn’t have worked out so well” This isn’t an article about Graph Databases. If you do wish to know more about Graph Databases then Google is your friend… but WAIT. Before you scuttle off

Never been made redundant? This is the article for you. > With the chip in my shoulder being hacked out with a battle-axe, I was ready for my next project. ROAARRRRRRRRR I was awesome, you could hear me roar! Head of Department, I had a legion of developers building lots

How does your development team compare? This isn’t an article about Ed Sheeran. I’ve never been a massive Ed Sheeran fan, but I do wonder if he’s starting to grow on me. I do like some of the synths he uses :D With that aside, one of

How to sound like you know what you’re talking about Quite often when in IT Management meetings sage advice is offered. You’ll hear these eponymous laws thrown around; they are mainly used to quickly demonstrate a point or the reason for unfavourable outcomes. Knowing what these “Laws” are

Agile Co-Location, is it necessary? > “be some weird meta-mega-multihanded daily stand-up beast” Extreme Polarity In my youth I saw most things as either: * x or y * yes or no * black or white I could fit everything into a neat category. I tended towards the sciences and maths are they

How to obliterate feeling overwhelmed > “taking an axe to him would probably have been a bit bold” “Hey how’s it going?” said an unfamiliar voice. I recognised the face. A kind face, but far taller than me. They were one of the bigger boys at my school. Only

Do you know why you’re following a particular process? The reality dawned on me. I’d been blindly following a process with little thought. Why was I doing this? As a team we’re winding down a large estate of products to be replaced with Commercial of the Shelf

A “Command & Control” IT Manager This is an angry text. I’m writing this listening to loud and angry music. Men are shouting, swearing and generally having a bad time. One of the systems I look after has been subject to Slippage! It happened a few years ago; I

Why you shouldn’t try and plan too much upfront I’ve always had a yearning to write games, yet never truly got around to it seriously. I’m aware of Unity as a tool for developing games and have done a few things in 3D many years ago. My

You may have heard that most car accidents occur near your own home. Between 1 and 5 miles seems to be the sweet spot. The most common type of collision is hitting parked cars, reversing and hitting walls or fences. The idea here is that people feel familiar with their

Soft skills training I recently got involved in a program which helps IT professionals improve their soft skills. It’s primarily a cultural activity and we’ve got some really clever people. However, I instantly felt that the way people talked to each other was different from what I was

There are many ways to eat a Cadbury Crème egg. The UK advert from the 90s shows people pouring it over their face, approaching it gently or turning into a wild Dog Goat and gnawing away at it. From the outside it’s a simple yet tasty chocolate with a