An interesting person — the founder and CEO of a technology startup — asked me an interesting question:

Where do I go to learn about good software development practices? I want to understand how my dev team works (or should work) and why they work that way. I want to be empathetic and not question things just because I don’t understand them but I also want to make sure we’re doing the right thing for the business.

(Undoubtedly I have paraphrased this somewhat)

This is Part 3 of what I think will be a four-part series. Part 1 examines daily…

An interesting person — the founder and CEO of a technology startup — asked me an interesting question:

Where do I go to learn about good software development practices? I want to understand how my dev team works (or should work) and why they work that way. I want to be empathetic and not question things just because I don’t understand them but I also want to make sure we’re doing the right thing for the business.

(Undoubtedly I have paraphrased this somewhat)

This is Part 2 of what I think will be a four-part series. Part 1 examines daily…

An interesting person — the founder and CEO of a technology startup — asked me an interesting question:

Where do I go to learn about good software development practices? I want to understand how my dev team works (or should work) and why they work that way. I want to be empathetic and not question things just because I don’t understand them but I also want to make sure we’re doing the right thing for the business.

(Undoubtedly I have paraphrased this somewhat)

The context is that they don’t have a technical co-founder who knows how to run development processes…

The reaction of many experienced, ‘serious’ engineers to low/no code solutions is as predictable as it is vociferous:

It’s just programming by another name … I prefer to write code than drag and drop … If I can’t write code it will never do exactly what I want … Where are the tests?

Most of what is being expressed are genuine concerns born of real experience. Many of us have been bitten by over-hyped technologies that promise far more than they deliver, leaving us to work around their limitations while our customers look impatiently on, wondering where the hell the…

This is not an article about the technology, product or business topics I usually write about. It is the story of planting a new 0.75 Hectare (1.8 Acres) woodland. These are undoubtedly some lessons for CTOs, Product Managers and Startup owners in here somewhere but I’m not going to attempt to find them; I’ll leave that up to you if you’re so motivated!

This is Part 4 of a short series. Part 1 describes the planning process, Part 2 the site preparation, and Part 3 the planting.

The planting of this woodland was our first and the idea was to…

This is not an article about the technology, product or business topics I usually write about. It is the story of planting a new 0.75 Hectare (1.8 Acres) woodland. These are undoubtedly some lessons for CTOs, Product Managers and Startup owners in here somewhere but I’m not going to attempt to find them; I’ll leave that up to you if you’re so motivated!

This is Part 3 of a short series. Part 1 describes the planning process and Part 2 the site preparation.

Of all the deliveries we’ve had over the pandemic period I can safely say nothing has been…

This is not an article about the technology, product or business topics I usually write about. It is the story of planting a new 0.75 Hectare (1.8 Acres) woodland. These are undoubtedly some lessons for CTOs, Product Managers and Startup owners in here somewhere but I’m not going to attempt to find them; I’ll leave that up to you if you’re so motivated!

This is Part 2 of a short series. Part 1 describes the planning process.

At the end of October 2020 we got final approval of our application from the Woodland Trust, paid our share of the cost…

This is not an article about the technology, product or business topics I usually write about. It is the story of planting a new 0.75 Hectare (1.8 Acres) woodland. These are undoubtedly some lessons for CTOs, Product Managers and Startup owners in here somewhere but I’m not going to attempt to find them; I’ll leave that up to you if you’re so motivated!

Three years ago my wife and I fulfilled a life-long dream we hadn’t realised we had and bought a small hill farm in a remote and rural part of North East England; beautiful views, open skies, isolation…