A volunteer project to demonstrate how I approach software engineering — More recently I have found myself looking for a new position for a software engineering company in DE, Germany. This has brought about a number of new and interesting challenges; most particularly for this article the need to demonstrate my capacity as a professional software engineer. The challenge when applying…

Hardly a revelatory notion and yet while I was sitting drinking my Sunday morning coffee the idea seemed to drive a needle directly toward the heart of organisational dysfunction, illustrating a set of nebulous and seemingly disconnected problems behind a singular easy to grasp notion. One that I am unclear…

Extending a “locking” primitive to allow updates on given primitives in ${N} directions — Recently I had the chance to work with the at Global Fashion Group in Berlin to help them work on shared services across ventures such as the Iconic, Zalora, Dafiti and Lamoda. This business operates at several orders of magnitude more scale and has grown aggressively in its fairly short…

Our world is hopelessly, hilariously complex. Both Thomas Thwaites in his quest to build a toaster[1] and AJ Jacobs in his quest to thank all the people responsible for his morning coffee[2] illustrate this complexity; it is essentially impossible to reason about how the world works together to produce the…

There are a series of allegories that encapsulate the murkier, more confusing part about producing software — the human part: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — Peter Drucker¹ “Organizations which design systems …​ are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” …

Looking for a fuller version of this article with pretty syntax highlighted code and additional tips & advice? Check out the original on littleman.co. Recently I have had the opportunity to join teams employing a number of different approaches to continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD): Version Control: Scripts embedded in…

How littleman.co organises projects as well as why we do it in that way — Version control is one of the more fundamental pieces of software development. It allows developers to navigate through a projects history to understand who implemented each change, as well as why they did so. It is an invaluable tool for use while understanding any given issue. littleman.co uses git as…

Understanding what (e)BPF is and what its used for — I have a fairly long history using Linux for a number of purposes. After being assigned Linux as a development machine while working with the team at Fontis a combination of curiosity and the need to urgently repair this development machine as a result of curiosity driven stick pokery meant…

A story about the process of becoming an “expert” — I have been extraordinarily lucky in my software development career. Given a limited set of experience and idle curiosity about computers I was able to meet a number of people who guided me to developing my development skill set until it is the reasonably broad, experienced skill it is today. …