Are You Being Too Agile?

Man lying under a tree daydreaming about the future. Proabably not what you'd call "too agile"Confession of a Chronic Futurist

I have a confession to make. I used to be a dreamer at work. Worse than that, I used to invest significantly into putting my dreams into motion.

What did that look like? It meant that when I was tasked with building a Model-2 presentation framework for the company I was working for, I bunkered down for over a month and came out with this massive framework that was going to be a solution to the whole world’s problems. It was basically most of what Struts did and some parts of what Spring does, before either of them existed. There were good things in there, and the company used the framework for many years, but I’m sure more than half the code I wrote never got used. I’d latched onto a good idea and run a marathon, but the team really only needed me to walk a mile.

Pragmatic Redemption

Then came the revelation of my software engineering life: agile. Continue reading

How to Avoid Making Huge Mistakes with Life’s Big Decisions

The Mistake

A condemned three-story house in DetroitWhen my wife and I had been married for a year, we made a decision to purchase an apartment. It remains, to date, the worst decision we’ve ever made.

To start off with, we probably shouldn’t have purchased anything at all. But there was pressure from parents, the peer pressure of our friends doing the same thing, and the constant fear in Sydney-siders of “getting left behind the market”. Looking back now, I see the bigger factors that we’d been married for one year, we were both very early in our careers, we had very little savings relative to our incomes, and we were living in a friend’s place for low rent. There weren’t really any good reasons to buy.

The big mistake, though, was the place we bought. Continue reading

Why You’ve Never Heard About Steve Jobs’ Skateboarding Prowess

… and the secrets of 7 other famously successful people.

There would be few adults in the western world who have not heard of Steve Jobs. A pioneer of personal computing, an entrepreneur of unrivalled clout, one-time owner of the world’s most successful digital animation studio, the man who took the helm of an almost bankrupt computer company and transformed it into the most valuable business in the world.

But have you ever heard about Steve Jobs’ skateboarding skills? Continue reading

A Blog About Me

Art installation that says "Replace Fear of the Unknown with Curiosity"Welcome to my new blog! I’ve had blogs before. I had a blog about photography for a couple of months. I had an active blog about Scala for quite a while, which even achieved fleeting fame a couple of times. But when circumstances pull me in other directions such that I haven’t taken any photos for a few months and I haven’t written any Scala for a few months, I’ve got nothing to add to those blogs

While those blogs may have become stagnant, I have not. I’m learning things all the time, every day; things that are fascinating, things that are useful and things that are worth sharing. I realised that constraining my previous blogs to certain topics resulted in constraining which parts of my new knowledge I was able to share with people. I tend to read a lot, both on the web and from dead trees, and I learn lots of things that I think other people might benefit from hearing about.

So, this is my new blog, and it’s about me. It will be about Scala, but also about software in general; and it might be about photography, but also more widely about life lessons; and it will probably have some stuff about writing software at Australian banking startup Tyro Payments; and it might sometimes be about being a Dad and a husband, working happily with people, living in Sydney, playing the drums, designing web sites, reading books. These are all things I do, all things I’m learning from, and all topics where I’ve learned useful things that it would be useful to share. But really, the topic is me. Hopefully, amongst all that defines me, both the person I am and the person I’m becoming, you’ll find something worth reading about and, most of all, some things worth learning.

Image credit: Zephyrance Lou