Another year, another bunch of books. I spend most of the year binging through thriller series that I had already had started in 2024. The books I really liked were the newest book from the Slough House series, the spy novel The Persian, and Fundamentals of Software Architecture (even if I didn’t finish it). I am still using Goodreads to track these, so you can find the pretty Year in Books there. ...

Clearly, I have been slacking for the last weeks. Just look at all the links from other people at the bottom! This might also be the last post for the year, as I will be enjoying the festive season. Nonetheless, a lot of great content this week. I discovered a few new blogs that will keep me busy for the future. ...

OK, Zoo might slightly be overstating it. Let’s start at the beginning. In March 2019, we moved from Barcelona into the countryside. While I grew up in a village and studied in a small town, my recent life I spend in London and Barcelona. It was also my first house, farmhouse even, having lived in flats most of my life. So clearly, I thought about how I could complete my cosplaying of country life. ...

Screenshot from TI99 Pirate Adventure game This week, I enjoyed the blog about chat programming, and coding at work, which is probably related. Leadership Hybrid workers are putting in 90 fewer minutes of work on Fridays – and an overall shift toward custom schedules could be undercutting collaboration - Friday is always different in Spain. Thermostats - Tuning team temperature - first rule of leadership: don’t panic Feedback doesn’t scale - this is mostly about bigger teams ...

I’ve mentioned my approach to technical debt often, but I’ve never actually written it down. Here’s the framework I use. Technical debt is most typically brought up from individual engineers or the engineering department. If not attended to, technical debt can slow down future product development and reduce the developer experience. To me, technical debt is simply technical work we choose to postpone, focusing on something that currently has higher priority. ...