As one of my lighter blog posts, I’ll be telling that story that every engineer gets to tell as some point: the reason why I got into this whole thing in the first place. It’s a topic that comes up from time to time so I thought I’d write it here for posterity. Catching the bug As a child of late 1980s, I grew up during the period where computers were there in schools and starting to appear in homes. But I started my journey a little earlier when, as a 6-year old, I used an old second-hand typewriter my mother bought for me to type out pages from my favourite books and to write little stories. I have these fond memories of grabbing a few ladybird books, taking the typewriter out of it’s little bag and pressing pressing each of the keys. These smooth cream coloured keys, the sound of the line change and the smell of ink. I’m an overly nostalgic hipster who still owns one of these old machines, but I understand the nostalgia as it really is the first thing that got me hooked on being able to type words and create a thing. ...
It’s 2025 and AI is here, and just about the only thing people in tech can talk about, but let’s flash back to 2010 when Public Cloud was the latest trend and the only thing tech could talk about. Can we follow this historical trend to predict the future of AI? How does the general public perceive AI? I’m pretty sure your non-tech neighbours can tell you what ChatGPT is, but do they know what AWS is? So, what’s different this time? ...
I have been fortunate enough over the past few years to to have some excellent coaching, some helpful mentors and one or two pretty good therapists. As a result I have been able to get to know myself quite well and as part of one of my goals of 2025 I want to do a little bit more sharing of my thoughts, my ideas and therefore more of myself in public. ...
As for many others, the new year and the first weeks of January are a time for reflection, goals setting and aspiring to be a newer, better version of ourselves. Despite being someone who is very driven by personal growth, I have never really felt the need to partake in this ritual. That is not to say that I have not undertaken many self-improvement activities and those of you looking through my posts of 2024 will know that I spent quite a bit of time habit stacking more things into my routine. ...
As the night draws in, Christmas draws ever closer and the year 2024 comes speeding to a close, I thought that for the first time I would take some time to reflect on the year. The role-r-coaster This year was certainly a year with some twists and turns. I started with one role, survived a drastic management re-org to eventually land in the new role of Deputy CTO and somehow just about managed to figure out what that role actually meant. I spent more time writing product documents and writing code than I had done before, I spent more time talking to customers this year than I had done for several years and overall I’m pleased with the progress. There was a moment where it was glibly described as “Harry Potter let out from under the stairs” and I have to agree that for a while it certainly felt that way. It has been the case in every time in my career journey I have found myself going through the typical periods of “Yes I can do this!”, “Wait, do what? What is this job?” and “Ok, maybe I sorta get this now”. As the year ends I’m phasing into the later. ...
Why I started Weeknotes Weeknotes are like a work journal, a personal journal, a micro-blog and occasionally a brag document all rolled into one. After reading this post about weeknotes and then following #weeknotes on mastodon for a few weeks I decided that I would give it a go. I’ve had a go at journaling in its many forms before but it’s never really stuck, but I though maybe this time by writing in public it act as encouragement to keep me going. ...
“Are you walking?” - Yes “Is your background moving?” - Yes If you’re reading this then it’s likely you’ve just asked me one of these questions, and as the 20th person who’s commented on it in the past 6 weeks I’ve probably just sent you the link to this post. This is not one of my usual blog posts. Sometimes, blogs take weeks of thinking and days of typing and editing to develop but other times a blog is one of those things (like with a digital garden) that you just type to avoid having to have the same conversations over and over and hopefully more people get something out of it if it’s written down. ...
Hamilton Helmer introduces the concept of “7 Powers” in his book titled “7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy”. In that book he identifies seven areas of business strategy that when executed well, create the potential for persistent differential returns (i.e., the company consistently outperforms it’s competitors and creates lasting financial value). In this post I will review this model against one specific type of business: the IT Managed Service Provider to demonstrate both historical trends in strategy and also where some future opportunities can be found and fought over. ...
What is Portfolio Architecture? About a year ago, I assumed the role of Head of Portfolio Architecture. However, even within the first few months, I encountered a common question: ‘What is portfolio architecture?’ Well, this is one of those posts that have been sitting in some draft form or another since the first few days of me taking on the new role. It’s not exactly the type of job title that one can easily ask your nearest AI and get a straightforward or relevant answer for - so I thought I’d add to the corpus of knowledge by writing down something here. ...
A love letter to RSS It has recently come to my attention that the technology I assumed foundational to the internet as I know it, RSS, is not something that everyone is aware of and using. The internet has gone through several generations and people’s interactions and habits along with it. Web 1.0 was an era of web portals, Web 2.0 the era of search and social and now the more recent generation where decentralisation, AI and IndieWeb are the topics of exploration. ...