The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities.
Carl Sagan, in "Wonder and Skepticism", from the Skeptical Inquirer Volume 19, Issue 1 (January-February 1995)
Latest from the blog
Most applications log prolifically and explain nothing. Gigabytes of output fill storage, drive six-figure observability bills, and when production breaks at three in the morning, the only entries that matter are the ones nobody thought to write.
The most engaged employees are burning out fastest whilst their disengaged colleagues coast through untouched. When the people who care most are consistently the ones who leave first, something structurally broken is being ignored.
The industry adopted microservices as the default architecture for modern systems, but the tax is coming due. When the company that helped popularise distributed services publishes a 90% cost reduction by returning to a monolith, the assumption deserves reexamination.
Who I Am
Two toddlers means my daily standup starts earlier than any reasonable person would choose, and involves negotiations over what gets eaten, worn, and prepared—in that order of escalating difficulty. Fatherhood demolished every illusion I had about time management and replaced it with something better—genuine prioritisation. The debugging skills transfer surprisingly well; toddler logic has its own consistency once you stop expecting rationality. I'm not claiming expertise—just stubborn determination and a full heart that compensates for the permanent sleep deficit.
My first program was a wrapper around ARJ archives that saved me typing verbose command-line flags. Not exactly revolutionary, but that dopamine hit of making a computer do what you want hasn't faded in three decades. From batch files on beige boxes through Pascal shareware that earned actual money, to architecting systems that handle real complexity—the tooling changed completely, the satisfaction didn't. I still approach problems the same way: understand what's actually needed, pick precisely the right tool, resist the urge to overengineer. The enthusiasm that sparked when my first rudimentary game actually worked is still running in the background.
I've owned more gadgets than I care to admit, starting with a Spectrum ZX that technically belonged to the household but was practically mine. The compulsion hasn't changed—every new piece of technology gets taken apart, metaphorically or literally, until I understand what makes it tick. My workspace looks like a testing lab crossed with a graveyard of "promising" devices that didn't survive the evaluation period. The ones that stick around earn their shelf space by solving actual problems, not by having impressive spec sheets. Thirty years of this and I'm still the person who reads the datasheet before the marketing page.
As a kid I worked through the local library's entire sci-fi section with the systematic determination of someone cataloguing inventory. Asimov and Zelazny built the foundation; Howey and Sanderson keep adding floors. My digital collection has long passed the point where "I'll get to that eventually" became aspirational fiction. The reading habit survived career changes, countries, and two children who now have their own growing libraries—mostly board books about trucks and animals, but the principle stands. A day without reading still feels incomplete, like forgetting coffee.
I photograph the way some people doodle—compulsively, without claiming any particular talent. Composition and light fascinate me more than pixel-peeping or gear specifications, though I'm not immune to the occasional equipment upgrade that I'll convince myself was necessary. The best shots happen between coding sessions and family chaos, usually when I'm not trying too hard. For every image worth showing, there are a hundred that prove photography involves a generous amount of luck alongside whatever skill you've accumulated.
Warhammer 40K scratches an itch that coding doesn't—something about the meticulous, tactile work of building and painting miniatures that requires a completely different kind of focus. My Grey Knights army grows with the deliberate pace of someone who paints one shoulder pad per evening after the kids are asleep. The Orks get attention when I need the opposite energy—less precision, more character. Other factions make occasional appearances when impulse wins over the backlog. The collection brings more satisfaction than the tabletop battles themselves, which is probably heresy in the community.
The LEGO habit started in childhood and never received the memo about growing up. What began with precious bricks from a kid who couldn't afford many evolved into shelves of modular buildings that my wife tolerates with admirable patience. I gravitate toward iconic sets that deserve display space rather than bulk collecting—each build offering that familiar satisfaction of pieces clicking together, both literally and as a metaphor I refuse to apologise for. There's something grounding about construction that follows clear instructions after a day spent debugging systems where the documentation lies.
Random Captures
