Blog

Robots Dream of Agentic Soup

Is it slop, or soup? I've been unemployed and then self-employed for nearly a year now, and it's given me a lot of time for thinking, and that's maybe not...

Here's a question that should make you uncomfortable: Does the AI you're using to build your software, run your automations, educate your kids, or provide companionship to millions of lonely...

What I got right about 2025, free coaching, positive things.

My brain has been spinning since mid-2024; everything seems to be moving at breakneck speed as the world violently jerks from one potentially cataclysmic event to another. At the beginning...

Tech Debt Isn't a Technical Problem. It's a Capitalism Problem

I've sat through countless conference sessions and meetup discussions about tech debt. Without fail, I find them boring at best and infuriating at worst. For years, I couldn't figure out...

Your Risk Management Process is a Bicycle Helmet at a Formula 1 Race

You're shipping faster than ever. AI coding assistants are cranking out pull requests. Your product team is testing three hypotheses a week instead of three a quarter. Features that used...

Don’t Give Your Brain Away: A Manifesto for Knowledge Sovereignty

The next battle for worker rights won't be about wages or hours — it will be about who owns your mind and the agents that act on your behalf. Fernando...

The Sceptic and AI

’m looking for a bit of help. I’m writing a blog post about scepticism's potential impact on AI's future. My current hypothesis is that there is a possible alignment with...

There is a meme that repeatedly pops up in my feeds that says something like “Adulting is just saying “it’ll calm down next week” repeatedly till you die”. On this...

Apple launched this apple Vision Pro, its first spatial computer, at the beginning of February and the reviews are in. Anyone who is anyone is extolling the virtues of this device as the next Leap Forward in human computer interaction.

Hey, are you a decision maker in the tech industry, from those who decide the strategy and direction of an entire company through to those who decide if you’re going to put a semi-colon at the end of a line of JavaScript? You broke the world. Yes, You.

No one is productive anywhere: Why we need to reframe the place of work debate.

Productivity (noun) pro· duc· tiv· i· ty ˌprō-dək-ˈti-və-tē ˌprä-, prə-ˌdək- the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the output rate per unit of input....

Much to the surprise of many: me, my old English teacher, an Oxfordshire English GCSE examination board, and anyone who has ever received any form of written communication from me, I’ve written a book.

I am now certain that Slack is the worst thing that has happened to the workplace since the misappropriation of Herman Miller’s Action Office concept, which birthed cubicles. Slack is...

Hold on tight (not literally); this one will be a little off-piste, but it has some vague relation to the workplace. But there's been something on my mind for a...

Both of my parents were Software Engineers. When I was younger, they did nothing to pressure me into following their career path. They might have dropped a few light triggers...

Much to the chagrin of my partner, I’m an obsessive creative tinkerer. Not in the sense that I creatively tinker with technology, but I constantly tinker with other types of...

For anyone following along, you’ll notice tech companies are having a wild ride working out what the future of their work policy looks like. Some are moving towards bringing people...

AI won’t take your job and won’t significantly impact the number of jobs people can access. Not because it can’t; looking at the rapid progress we are making with the...

Maybe I’m a neo-Luddite, but I’m worried we’re close to the peak of human creativity, and it’s the fault of ‘creative’ AI like ChatGPT and DALL-E. Ironically this boom in...

About ten years ago, I was part of a founding team for a product way before its time (said like everyone with a failed start-up). A no-code solution that would...

The sometimes hard-to-swallow truth is that, at scale, flat organizations don’t work. As a company grows they need to be chunked into smaller, more manageable pieces. Companies split up into...

After talking to multiple people I started to feel that there was a significant trend toward people feeling that Hybrid work, spending some time working from home, and sometime in...

We’ve been sold the myth that hybrid work is the perfect mix between being productive and being focused in your curated, comfortable home office space. Then spending a day or...

Most of us have received the email. The title reads “Back To The Office Policy” it starts with something like “We all believe that face-to-face collaboration is part of creating...

What do Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have in common? Experts have suggested that these three men show borderline signs of being psychopaths. But they're not the "murdery"...

Over the last couple of decades, the explosion of tech companies led to their leaders being idolized as people with superhuman capabilities; Gods of industry, savant business leaders with visionary...

So I explained in, quite some detail, why I started writing this blog. It seemed like I was a good engineering manager, but I couldn’t work out why. I felt...

Don't let 'side hustle pornstars' intimidate you into feeling bad about being lazy and unproductive. It's OK to sit on the sofa and turn your brain off for as long...

Want to understand what defines you as a leader, use this step by step process to define your own leadership manifesto. Last year I went through the process of developing...

It's easier to burn someone out through emotional labour than physical labour. This isn't something we can keep ignoring. I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions as works recently. Mainly...

Are your company values a boring motivational poster stuck on the wall, or a battle standard that you lead your team under? Company values, we’ve all seen them, every company...

Quit worrying about what your git branch is called and hire for diversity already. The tech industry has a diversity problem. I think by now that we’re all in agreement...

Everyone is talking about their great tips for 'Working From Home' but there is one killer tool we're not talking about. I avoided for a long time jumping on the...

At Klarna, we hire amazing people. This statement isn’t hyperbole. I’ve not met one person in the year that I’ve been at Klarna who didn’t impress me in some way....

10x developers are a risk I'm not willing to take. They are not a sustainable rock to build your team on. We are still talking about 10x developers, rockstars, and...

Do you consider yourself to be a role model? Well, believe it or not, you are. Whatever stage of your career you are at, there is someone somewhere looking up...

I built a spoof job listing site, Titlify, as a protest about the industries' problem with job title hyperinflation. Why did I do that? A few months ago, I built...

Agency developers make incredible product developer, they're used to delivering at least 10 products every year and have seen the whites of the clients eyes. Hi, my name is Philip,...

I love online Lightning Decision Jams as a way to make collective decision-making easier for remote teams. I work for a company that hires very talented people, however getting intelligent...

If you think personal development plans are too much work. You are a negligent manager. And quite possibly an arsehole. I was recently amazed to hear another engineering manager say...

People have started talking about silent meetings, and as someone who has dyslexia, this is terrifying. I was recently catching up on some episodes of an amazing podcast called ‘Eat,...

I suffer from dyslexia. I thought it might be helpful to share a few things that help me in my day to day life. So as I mention in my...

Over the last couple of months of brain-farting, I’ve started to collect the things I’ve been posting into several categories. These categories have become a ‘manifesto’ for how I want...

It's not OK to let someone be an arsehole just because they are talented. Challenging their behaviour is essential. Something that I wish I had learnt early on in my...

People cry at work, probably more than you think. Crying at work is OK. If it makes you uncomfortable, then that’s your problem. For some reason, people tend to trust...

Middle management isn’t sexy, but it’s essential. It’s not a dirty word. I'm a middle manager and I'm proud. When I started my career at the turn of the century,...

Feedback: Be a little German, Be a little American.

Giving feedback is hard; giving good feedback is even harder. What can we learn from the alternating extremes of German and American feedback cultures? What people say and what they...

Is the social acceptability of drinking within the tech industry causing us an exclusion problem? I have a complicated relationship with alcohol. My mother was an alcoholic who drank herself...

The Friend Zone: Not Just a Problem for Dudebros.

Getting 'Friend Zoned' is a fear of all douchebag alpha male dudebros. But, as a manager how do you balance being a friend with being a colleague? The thing that...

Being outside of your comfort zone is, well, uncomfortable. However, it's a place where there are creative things to learn and excellent growth opportunities. So how do you support your...

One of the biggest challenges of leading a team of developers is dealing with their fragile egos and the problems that arrive from Imposter Syndrome. If you’re not familiar with...