Last week at a local testing meet-up I help run we had an open chat about AI and the future of testing. One point that really stood out was the time-scales associated with AI ‘taking my job’. While it feels like developers and testers are safe for now, those working…

We’ve started a book club at work and the first book on the list was Resilient Management by Lara Hogan, published by A Book Apart. The book covers a range of topics related to being a manager in the tech industry, broken down into five chapters which lead you from…

I was watching one my favourite movies — An American Werewolf in London the other day and realised that the scene where the doctor visits the Slaughtered Lamb and asks about the Pentagram on the wall would make a good joke about team’s attitudes to legacy code by…

Recently I found myself having to automate a Single Sign On (SSO) implementation that used Microsoft Azure AD as the indentity provider and encountered some issues which I thought were worth sharing. It’s worth noting that what I’m about to describe is an anti-pattern in Cypress, they recommend not automating…

I’ve just released v1.5.0 of midi-to-lsdj my little library for converting MIDI files into the commands needed to reproduce the song in Little Sound DJ (LSDJ) on the Gameboy. What’s new MIDI file parsing has moved from midi-file to @tonejs/midi Moved to using tonalJS for working with notes Support for tempo changes…

In October 2022 I started a sabbatical from work. My employer at the time (I’ve since left that job and start a new one next week) had a policy that allowed those with three years of service (I had six) to take up to three months off unpaid, I had…

I’m starting a new job soon at a company that uses Kotlin, a language I’d never used before so I decided while I had some downtime between jobs to learn the basics so I wouldn’t start and be completely out of my comfort zone. I had used Scala previously and…

Over the last couple of months I’ve been getting into statecharts. It started while playing around with porting Reciprocal.dev (RIP) to work on top of tldraw as that uses them and since then, I’ve experimented with Stately’s excellent Xstate-based editor and then I found Sketch.systems. Sketch.systems takes statechart visualisation a…

After my trip to Denmark, Sweden and Norway in November 2022 I still had some credit with British Airways left to use by September 2023. Due to exchange rates I actually ended up with a fair amount to spend, so the girlfriend and I decided to go back to Iceland. …