Category: Uncategorized

Midweek thoughts on Samhain and Governance

Posted on by graham
Saw 2 butterflies cavorting through the air yesterday. Outside now, fireworks pop in the dark, but it’s still not cold. More like early September in old weathers. Ha, “in old weathers”, a new phrase to track progress like “in old money” and “in olden times”. Myths but not memories.

Abundantly mixed energies this week, with the long stretch of a fresh illness finally catching up with me after going out for local drinks on Friday. Bad sleep, usually of my own making, on top of that. And today a pulled shoulder.

But blessings too. A small piece of work has come together nicely, and I have my head round CSS flexbox just that little more tightly, like a comfortable scarf. I dealt with a few last minute unexpecteds quickly and easily, which is often the bit I try to avoid most but also enjoy the most. Further work this week is lined up, after a trip up to London tomorrow for a conference.

I haven’t been to a conference in years, and I’ve ironed off a new shirt and hoping my ill doesn’t get too much in the way of enjoying the day, a day all about Governance. I’m going with my Writing Our Legacy hat on, but this is a field I’m rapidly wanting to get into more, philosophically and practically.

I enjoy governance, I’ve decided – or, more realistically, I’ve come to realise that I enjoy it. Governance comes down to goal-setting, decision-making, transparency and feedback loops, all tucked into a package of collaboration. The word itself doesn’t lend itself to me easily though, but then I realise I’ve been effectively doing governance for over a decade though. Decisions, oversight, correction, collaboration. Got a team? Want it to do well? Governance is where it’s at.

For me, governance ties in with my personal field of software systems. I’ve used the recent point of Samhain to take stock of where I am, and write up fresh thoughts. You can find them on my “now” page.

What is the future of the tech industry TNG?

Posted on by graham

Holy shit, stat of the day comes from this FT article (£) on jobs for graduates vs AI.

The ISE said graduate vacancies at the large employers it surveys had grown 4 per cent in the past year, compared with 6 per cent the previous year. But graduate hiring in the digital and IT sector fell 35 per cent, while in finance and professional services it was down 5 per cent.

Emphasis added because wow. I’m sure some of that isn’t just AI, but also wider tech cycles, but still.

I’m at an age where I think a lot about giving back to future generations, especially as my own kids get closer towards finding a job or a career or whatever you want to call it these days. A conversation the other day pointed out that people are more likely to use AI for menial tasks, which blocks off those in-roads that you’d normally take as a junior, as an intern, etc. This really made me think, especially alongside the push for Universities to have more industry links.

There’s a huge conflict going on here. Do businesses want to train people up, or don’t they? Do they even want human workers, or not – the overall push for AI and ML (oh, and de–unionising) seems to be decisively against this idea. Similarly people are having kids less, and at older ages (the parents, not the kids). But where does that leave us as an intergenerational society?

As we build hyper-automation into our lives, are we thinking about those that come after us as part of our decision-making? As with ecological concerns and resource usage, how many generations to come are we designing for? Or are we just taking what we can, and closing the door behind us?

Continuous Personal Development (or “Things I’ve Been Learning About”)

Posted on by graham

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed in my work is the opportunity to learn new things. Looking back, I feel slightly spoiled that, in my first job, we jumped between codebases and languages for different projects at a rate that most people would laugh at now – I’d work across Perl, ColdFusion, HTML, Javascript, ActionScript and more, all within a year. In the background I’d be personally playing around with Java, Linux admin, and god-knows-what-came-along.

The joy of technology for me has always been the challenge of … cajoling the systems to produce something of use and of value. Ends before means. It’s a fascination which continues 25 years on, that ever-present love-hate relationship with software and toolchains that accepts that you’re never, really, going to fully understand what’s going on. That you need to think on your feet, figure stuff out fast, absorb the docs almost intuitively, and make good things happen.

The last few months have been fairly technical, and I didn’t want to lose track of the variety of things I’ve been digging into, both for clients and for myself. Here’s a bit of a (definitely incomplete) list of some of the things I’ve been enjoying learning about and applying.

  • Trying out Nuclei Vulnerability scanner as a way to check for exploits on an old site.

  • POP chain exploits that use magic methods (such as __wakeup()) in PHP objects to run code.

  • The difference between CVSS and EPSS scores for assessing security risks.

  • Docker container setup, to get legacy sites running for development locally, as well as for throwing a new staging server together.

  • Replacing the inner door seal on a Bosch washer-dryer machine (which is the same as Siemens. The replacement part costs between £40 and… £120?). Labour is always 5 times what you expect.

  • In-depth TinyMCE hacking, including adding in a lot of custom code to implement drag-and-drop functionality for any files (not just images). And the licence differences between TinyMCE v6 (MIT) and v7 (GPLv2).

  • Javascript MutationObservers as a way to hang events off any changes to the DOM and styling, including CSS transitions. Related: The transitionend event.

  • Hooking into the DOM of the GoGoCarto mapping tool to do some in-depth (and probably somewhat fragile) UI changes.

  • httrack as a way of taking static copies of sites, but also learning that it’s important to pre-generate any images and files required for responsive display, and to copy those into place ahead of time as well. Always a trade-off.

  • The difference between em and ch units in CSS.

  • Passing messages between iframes using the postmessage() method, and combining it with scrollIntoView() to move an iframe fully on screen when interacting with it.

OK, these are all the technical things I’ve logged anyway. It’s harder to bullet point the softer skills around freelancing right now, but maybe that’s another post?

Reflection is not a quick-win skill

Posted on by graham

There’s a part of my brain that is very impatient.

Is this a genetic thing, an in-built urge to avoid boredom? Is it due to growing up alongside the internet, as the twin notions of convenience and instant gratification truly kicked in? Or do I increasingly feel the steely fingers of time passing over me, never slowing. It’s hard to say.

So anyway, I naturally want quick results, it seems. Which, paradoxically of course, means it’s harder to see things long term sometimes. "Sustained" action can become an aspiration rather than a practicality.

Which is relevant right now. After reading about the concept of Ikigai and the overlap of purpose, skills, and needs, I woke up excited on Monday morning with a few realisations running through my head. There were directions I knew wanted to point and paths I wanted to tread. Everything seemed clearer than before.

And then, as usual, I muddied it up by writing it down 🤣

Actually, no need to be harsh on myself. Rather, just appreciate that writing things down can be a difficult exercise, especially when it comes to trying to communicate difficult stuff to anonymous others. It’s a fool’s game in some ways, but often a worthwhile one, just to get garbled sentences out of the way.

People ask me what I do, and I generally um and er a bit, which I’ve decided isn’t the greatest way to sell your services, or spin your own story. For me, it’s fine, but I’ve known myself for a few years now. Other people, well, haven’t. Seems fair.

And when I come to answer, I also tend to break it down into two parts – what I do (or have done), and what I would like to do. Liminal transition life is full of ambiguity like this.

So Monday morning, with the treat of a decent coffee, I wrote down what my skills and interests were – one per tiny post-it – and arranged them very roughly by 1) how good I thought I was at it, and 2) how much I wanted to do it. I also used two different colour, one for technical ("hard"?) skills such as coding, and another for "soft" skills, such as architecture. It was pretty quick to do – being in a constant state of reflection tends to help, at least with this bit.

(Oh, sidenote, I also started the session with an I Ching reading, which turned things pretty spooky fairly quickly. I don’t think I’ve had the same reading twice in a row before, and certainly not within a month, but here was "Advance" again. Keep going forwards, the words said, there’s a path here. I’ll take that as a definite sign.)

By the end, I had a few new things:

  1. An understanding that I enjoy code, but as a creative endeavour, rather than a technical one. I’ve always enjoyed coding because it allows me to create things, and I don’t enjoy it when what I’m making doesn’t make some kind of sense to me. I went back to Uni because of this. I understand stakeholder needs because of this. It’s what I look for in new coders. But it’s never something I was taught, or thought you could take qualifications in (except academically).

  2. A realisation that I have a bit of a language barrier at the moment, which is why I’ve been talking about things like job titles recently. I’ve also got similar thoughts about things like "Sustainability" though, which I should blog about. I really can’t decide if it’s better to use other people’s terminology up-front, or force through my own, garbled vocabulary.

  3. Some scribbled notes about practical ideas. Write more blog posts. Form more relationships. Make time for this stuff, otherwise I’ll just be wishing I was doing it.

  4. The chance to look back over some of my written notes from the last few years, and the hindsight to filter these better.

Hindsight is important. It’s an artefact of the journey being a slow one, one which develops at its own pace (albeit marginally influenced by how quickly you Get On With It). Hindsight comes from experience, and experience comes from doing, but also reflecting.

Despite the world wanting to get faster constantly, this process isn’t one which benefits from increased speed and more convenient technology.

And that’s OK.

Where’ve I been?

Posted on by graham
Seem to have fallen off the blogging train recently – after I (mostly)
finished drpfd, October rolled on the front of the storms, and I was
(am) caught up among client work, personal projects, and a busy home
life. All of which has been good, just not very public, and definitely
with little time to write Words Which Might Matter.

Still, it’s good to check in. Throughout the maelstrom, I’ve been
learning a lot. For instance!

* Modern CSS units for site responsiveness

in an age where scrollbars are ethereal, and the real difference
between “fixed” and “sticky” positioning.
* How to make things in Pulp ,
the 1-bit editor for Playdate games, and how to
keep a devlog in Discord.
* How to use Carbon Fields , a free
alternative to ACF Pro in WordPress.

Behind the scenes, there’s a lot happening at Writing Our Legacy
too, and I try to keep some time for
relaxing. I really need to meditate more when my brain is trying to
juggle so many things though.

I also keep coming back to personal principles and the “bigger game”
that is social equality, climate change, and building something better.
Maybe I’m not doing enough here, or maybe now is not the right time to
make changes – this dichotomy is, in itself, an interesting conundrum.
Busy-ness leads to routine. Routine leads to acceptance. Acceptance
leads to busy-ness.

There is never the Right Time to break the cycle, so is now the Right
Time to break the cycle?

From Task Lists to the Art of Enjoyment

Posted on by graham
It must be late summer, as the bindweed in the garden has begun to take over. I spent a few minutes today pulling out some of the runners and untangling the plants it had wrapped around, which gave me some time to think more about why we do things.

As per yesterday, I’m reassessing the general idea of task and to-do lists. A part of me wants to shift to something more enjoyable, and alongside this notion of “joy”, I’ve been mulling over what gives me joy. (Is there a big difference between “joy” and “to enjoy”? Perhaps not semantically, but there’s a lot to be said for thinking about things in terms of verbs – behaviour, temporarily in flow and doomed.to change, rather than the asset- and accumulation-driven realm of nouns.)

What is that feedback loop that makes me enjoy things? Sometimes it’s the simple process of facing a challenge and resolving it in an inventive way. But there still needs to be a reason behind it – I feel like something should be improved as a result, and I think back to the idea that “if you’ve made the world better during your life, you’ve done ok”.

I had this vaguely in mind as I pulled up the strings of weeds with gloved hands. To-do style: “I must clear out the bindweed.” Enjoyment style: “I can improve the garden’s environment.”

But then. I wondered what I was improving. Or rather, who and what it was being improved for. Was I really clearing the weeds so that the small apple tree could grow more vigorously? Or was it to make the garden neater, for me, for the family, for the neighbours? What did the bindweed think about this, or the spiders that scuttled out of the way as I removed the undergrowth around them?

I didn’t have a firm answer. But with that, I kind of realised that there wasn’t necessarily an answer to be found. “Improvement” depended on your point of view – your own values and interests, and your position in the system. In your timescale for awareness, and in your appetite for change.

Plenty of land and cultures have been torn down and apart, based on one idea of “improvement” or another. Entire educational industries try to shoehorn attitudes into learning alongside skillets and opportunities. “Improvement” can be a form of wielding power, an ominous and subjective decision around what is good and bad. Can we ever say that improvement is a net-positive game rather than a zero sum one, that to improve something is always to deny something else?

It is not wrong to want to improve things. It is a natural (and unique) human desire. But it can be wrong to do it without thinking through the power balances involved, and to enforce an aim of improvement where consent, rationale and emotion are bypassed in the process.

Which leads back to a more nuanced perspective about what it means to enjoy something. It can be a delicate thing, if one is aware of the systems involved. Thinking too much about it can severely curtail that getting l hedonistic idea of doing something for the love of it, but perhaps that just means we should tread more carefully, and be proud of the smaller changes that we’re more certain of?