Viewing profile — pjbster

I always say that a job without an end date is a lifestyle.

"I had a guaranteed military sale with ED-209. Renovation programme. Spare parts for 25 years. Who cares if it worked or not?"

Probably a condition imposed by the US in order for the UK to avoid tariffs or to grease the wheels of other trade agreements.

Government IT spending doesn't follow the same fiscal rules as your basic household budget. It's not the case that the government has a finite pot of money to spend and when it's g…

Hard agree. (2) is all about building out the test suite; once you have this (3) becomes a cake walk. I've worked in a lot of places where end to end testing is performed manually …

The UK is drowning in debt. The Office for National Statistics publishes several datasets charting the sorry story. Here's a good one: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpubl…

You're not thinking like an economist :) Here's something I saw on Twitter (no source): The bicycle is the slow death of the planet. General Director of Euro Exim Bank Ltd. got eco…

Back when he was still considered quotable, Dominic Cummings often mused about the UK's future post-Brexit. I seem to remember his blog mentioning data science and drug research as…

Even if the organistion is fully signed up to the knowledge building philosphy, it can still be derailed if the staff aren't up to scratch. Around 12 years ago, my employer tasked …

I have 3 kids and have been to visit A&E countless times over the years. I always note the hand written checklists stuck up in the walls of Triage and wonder how many of these were…

I recommend the book Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson. It covers offshore tax havens and the central role played by the City in facilitating capital flight and tax avoidance. C…

Mmm. Bluesky is the tits, for sure, but Trump has unfinished business. This is from 2020: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/trump-and-section-230-what-know We can assume that Twitter wa…

> Write everything (generally, new features) twice has turned out to be really good strategy for me, but it doesn't sit well with bizdev or project managers and tends to be perceiv…

There was a detailed proposal to introduce encoding/json/v2 last year but I don't know how far it's progressed since then (which you probably already know about but mentioning it h…

This is tech debt, pure and simple. https://news.sky.com/story/down-the-drain-what-went-wrong-wi... The flaws in the sewerage system are fundamental and pervasive. It would be a na…

However lavish or detailed or faithful to the Gibson Vibe this adaptation turns out to be, it will live or die on its realisation of Molly Millions, the baddest badass take-no-shit…

I think the failing test is meant to help with code review. The commit would be rebased out prior to merging into main.

It feels like there's a tiny bit of conflicting advice in this. There's the "not rocket science" rule which results in "no CI-failing commits on main" and then there's this: > Thir…

Whereas I am still livid that KDE missed an open goal by calling their calendar KOrganiser instead of KPassa.

Maybe we're coming at this from different ends? I've always adopted the position that the database is the source of truth, not the ORM data model. I've always maintained that mirro…

The big draw of ORMs is (was?) the idea of database independence which is a fools errand unless you're a vendor pushing some kind of application which needs some kind of relational…

DRY also removes an easy opportunity to expose patterns which are things that people are incredibly good at recognising and internalising. I used to religiously apply DRY but now I…

To my mind, all discussions about code design boil down to the reduction of cognitive load (CL). “Cognitive load refers to the amount of effort that is exerted or required while re…

Possibly. However, after further reflection, I am unable to come up with a scene with redeeming dialogue in any of the films. Obvs. my take is offbeat because the films were a mass…

I have two different major gripes. First, the power of the ring is not put into a proper context and, second, the film's exposition ruined the role of Gandalf and undermined the ot…