Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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fitness•

Change for life

Banks will often advertise promotions offering sizeable sums of money for opening an account. There are all sorts of conditions like, a minimum amount of money to be deposited each month, and keeping the account open for a certain number of months. How is this profitable though? It's profitable because changing banks is something that most of us never do. This isn't the only activity seldom considered e.g. when was the last time you changed your brand of toothpaste? There are certain things we're quite happy to try for a while and there are choices we made long ago and...

2 min readRead more →
fitness•

Snake oil selling better than ever

This is the first in a long series of posts about fitness. By the end you will be better prepared than ever before to attack your personal path to fitness. But before we begin, let's tackle the elephant in the room: why the hell are you taking fitness tips, from a middle-aged, technology office worker!? In 2019 the fitness industry is worth approximately $87.2 billion. More people are interested in fitness than at any time in the history of mankind. And to be fair, there are a lot of fit people around; there is a lot of sport being played...

3 min readRead more →
management•

Manager README

The concept of a manager README doc, as an introduction of what to expect from a new manager, has become popular in technical circles because it's what we use to introduce our software projects. For the first time in nearly five years, I'm changing company and this feels like the perfect way to let my new colleagues understand my core beliefs. n00b If I'm new to the team or company, I'm the newbie, and I'm here to learn. For the foreseeable future I'll be asking questions, and specifically. I'll ask "Why?" a lot. Not to be annoying - even though...

3 min readRead more →
management•

Are you joining a good engineering team?

You're unlikely to read a job spec these days that doesn't contain the word, Agile (capitalised, of course), scrum, kanban, or possibly the acronym TDD. It's comforting for developers to know that they won't be expected to work under the Waterfall software development process; that they're not writing legacy code from scratch without a build pipeline of hierarchical automated tests; or worse still, they won't be on the wrong end of undocumented, random, last minute feature changes. The job spec might have little basis in reality though. Whether or not a company follows an Agile process, either honestly or by...

5 min readRead more →
management•

How much coding should a manager do?

In my day job we use Slack as a key communication tool - for those who haven't used it, it's basically a corporate version of IRC with good UX. In a private channel for those in leadership positions, there was a question about how to transition from Software Engineer to Engineering Manager; what to consider when moving from a predominantly individual contributor (IC) specialisation to a team management focused role. My reply got an upvote from about 10% of the channel, so thought it a good start for my first blog post on the subject of management\: Q: How much...

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essays•

Are you happy?

A thought experiment occurred to me which looks to answer the question, "Are you happy?" In a science fiction film I saw recently there was a fantastical machine that copies (clones) whatever thing or person is placed inside it. Without ever explicitly going through the detail of the pros and cons of the situation, the people who use the machine to clone themselves do so at great risk to their very being. Because the ability to make another person, exactly the same as an existing one, has such devastating consequences its users preemptively setup a murder. And these consequences though...

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