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Now engineers not just software are consuming and disrupting the world

admin@example.com — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 13:13:00 +0000

Now engineers not just software are consuming and disrupting the world

When Marc Andreessen informed the world why software is consuming the world back in 2011 , I didn't anticipate this trend permeating various aspects of life and business to the extent I'm witnessing today.

Yesterday, I was pleased to come across Cover, thanks to Enes Yilmazer's video showcasing a TINY HOUSE as the Future of Housing. This brought together many of my interests.

I have been following Boxable's efforts for quite some time. For nearly a decade the UK has faced a housing shortage which today has climbed to 550,000 houses per year, and the four major housebuilders have no financial incentive to address this issue (basic supply and demand dynamics).

So, what's new with Cover? Well, they have ex-employees from Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, and Ferrari. You can design your custom build from your smartphone.

I have a secret passion for tiny, minimalist homes. The fact that Enes, who has reviewed some of the most exclusive and expensive residential homes worldwide, is impressed is impressive.

Where else are software engineers making an impact?

Audrey Tang, a software engineer and open-source advocate, demonstrated an impressive adaptation of his skills (blog.thegovlab.org/government-by-the-people-with-the-people). Specifically, Tang applied concepts like forking software source code to create g0v sites by opposition parties in government.

I encourage you to listen to one of Tang's many interviews or podcasts to be inspired to disrupt other industries and areas of life using everyday digital product concepts such as rapid prototyping, source control, and many more.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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Avoiding the AI Mirage: Why Drupal’s Open DNA matters

admin@example.com — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 19:32:37 +0000

Avoiding the AI Mirage: Why Drupal’s Open DNA matters

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending Jamie’s first of five sessions named Bringing Drupal AI into your DNA, which also coincided with the Drupal AI initiative announced this week.

My personal key takeaway from this was how I agree that Drupal well suited as Digital Ops Orchestration too.

Beyond its technical suitability, you could add Drupal’s rich heritage in Open Source beyond just licensing but collaboration with the community.

In a day of age where AI SaaS platforms are emerging left, right, and centre, and AI hustlers and vibe coders are leveraging AI to build businesses with million-dollar ARR.

For those of us who are seasoned enough to have been working for decades in both Software Development and Digital, we know the risks associated with vendor lock-in.

Case studies of this risk don’t come as perfect as Builder.ai, which at one point had a $1.5B valuation and was publicly backed by Microsoft but which turned out to be the other kind of AI (700 Actual Indians working behind the scenes).

Here are my key takeaways:

Creative Effort — If you’re using AI in your Content Management System to generate AI content, you’re barely scraping the bottom of the barrel. I’m not sure I’d even call it low-hanging fruit. How about we call it the least creative effort?
Portability & Contingency — Are vibe coders and AI hustlers doing any due diligence? Microsoft sure wasn’t. What about contingencies? How about a platform that is already open source so that if or when your preferred or overvalued low/no-code platform collapses, you have portability and contingency?
Ethics — AI brings this challenge to the forefront. Are we just creating unsustainable digital pollution? This is the age of authenticity, so authentic Open Source companies backed with communities have value.
Can we pivot? Because everything is about to pivot and adapting, leading well, and bringing that community with you is quite a challenge.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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Whats up with the “2-page CV” status quo?

admin@example.com — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 19:28:03 +0000

Whats up with the “2-page CV” status quo?

Yep, that old guideline I’ve always had an aversion towards for decades biw. Are we even paying attention? Who prints CV’s these days, and why are we stuck with constraints from the printing era?

During my career, I’ve had to review innumerable CV’s. For so many decades that I still remember when the department was Personnel Management, then People Management, and the latest iteration under Talent Management. It did help that I’ve worked with clients from the Recruitment industry as well as Organisational Design and HR Change Management consultants.

Back in 2009, I was tasked with helping one of my clients in scaling their in-house software development team from less than a handful to 60+. I designed a technical interview test— it was fun watching candidates having to code face-to-face with a paper and pencil— and then supported the hiring board for the second round of interviews. And for anybody who has not worked with hiring in the Public sector, we double-downed in making sure every step of the process was fair.

Eventually, I had to stop helping the client in the process because they wanted to poach me, and I wasn’t going to get away from running my technical interview, but that’s a story for another day.

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to scale my own large team. I’ve worked out that during the 2020-2023 peak of remote working, I was responsible for hiring 86 into our team.

Thankfully, as you grow your team, you also level-up your own team with regard to interview techniques, guidelines, and even ethics.

Here are some insights and thoughts from quite literally 2.5 decades of interviewing, easily more than 250 engineers:

Hire the aptitude, train the skills. Try to spot the aptitude and search for times when they have had to adapt and learn.
Engineers are generally not great at selling themselves. This frequently translates to terrible CV’s.
More of a reason I scan through EVERY CV. Ideally with the talent team to gain a two-way shared understanding. On one end, the idiosyncrasies of the technologies and how they relate to each other, but also the insight which the talent team brings to the table from their research. This is the least I could do to honour those who took their time to apply. Many CV’s terrible to scan, and that almost always has nothing to do with the number of pages but clarity and structure. I also read from past to future because I’m looking for potential to learn examples of progression. I see that many organisations are delegating this to AI, but this is an incredible opportunity to understand the competitive landscape of talent.
While scanning, I use PDF highlighting to pick keywords I may want to dig into during the process or interviews. This includes anything that would help me remember the candidates.
Watch out for biases. When you hire that many, chances are you hired several duds, and in my case, they tended to be due to confirmation bias. Engineers who had a similar trajectory to mine or who were better at either presenting or selling themselves and to whom I gave the benefit of the extra doubt. Make sure you’re buddying up and have sounding boards with your colleagues to counteract this.

Bonus - Interview etiquette:

Be respectful of time. Punctual start and finish.
Interviews are two-way. I respect giving a 10-minute window at the end to turn the tables around. If at any given time you’re running out of time, be respectful and do not assume you can either overrun to steal that time away from them. If the interview is going well, pre-empt for another slot or more time. 100% full attention. Turn DND on. We used Google Drive templates with a script as a guideline and a battery of questions, which in turn would become a real-time chat between interviewers and collaborative note-taking. Let the candidate know that we would be 100% attentive but would be taking notes as we went along. I prefer to take note of everything verbatim, with errors and all. Sometimes, by the time you realise something was note-worthy, it’s already too late, and I’ve used it frequently for post-interview deliberations with your co-interviewer.
1st Question: How do you know about us and what we do and the role? Start in their native language and use it as a baseline for their communication skills. Generally speaking, engineers are not the best communicators, but you need to rule out if it’s just their English. This question opens the opportunity to talk about referrals and gives you insight into what they perceive your company does. More importantly, it lets you know if they did some homework… it’s shocking how many do not, and sometimes the Talent team have not done their work on the role you’re hiring for.
Post interview debrief. Mull over the notes post interview with your co-interviewer ASAP. Two are very much better than one and can pick-up on insights which may have been missed. With enough practice it becomes a dance where you’re supporting each other. Our summary notes included: Pros & Cons Notes - neither pro nor con but relevant or as a memory jog Hire - top of the list Consider - compare with others Avoid
Hire slowly but also fire quickly. Need I say more? This is a long-term commitment to at least a year’s worth of salary and not to mention all the time and effort it takes to onboard a new team member.

At the peak of hiring, there was also a peak of resignations. During those days, it was rare for a week to go by without a resignation. We hired stars, duds, and even misjudged talent who performed amazingly within weeks, and within the next month, it became apparent we had undervalued them as they found a better offer elsewhere.

So back to the “2-page CV”. It’s not a hard and fast rule everywhere as it varies from country to country. But I had become accustomed to the importance of the CV, and yet in Colombia, I had to push back with the talent team who insisted that in Colombia, the CV was not that important. I would not accept interview slots without having reviewed a real CV, not just an anaemic LinkedIn export.

And at the end of the day, if you have made an effort to document your career in a legible CV format, I will honour your emotional labour with a read. And if you think you’re a rockstar who does not have the time to put that emotional labour together, then I don’t have to correspond on my end either.

Also, does the “2-page CV” limit apply to LinkedIn profiles where physical pages do not even exist? Or is the purpose of CV’s now changed to feed the AI data lords? I now see SEO keyword stuffing CV’s that certainly don’t read well, in particular given 40% of these words are in bold, crying for attention and ironically overwhelming the humans trying to make sense of it.

What I do know is that I’m grateful my parents enrolled me in a fast reading course as a teenager —which has stuck— so I can and have skimmed… probably thousands of CV’s by now.

Am I just too old-school? I’m open to being challenged!

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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Beyond Cheap: The Dark Side of Consumerism and an opportunity for the Circular Economy

admin@example.com — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:19:50 +0000

Beyond Cheap: The Dark Side of Consumerism and an opportunity for the Circular Economy

Well, that was a tumultuous week for the world, stock markets, pension funds, and even Treasury bonds.

With the largest repercussion being a lack of confidence as to what will happen with tariffs globally even after the 90-day pause on this trade war. Do businesses have clarity on how to react, invest, move? Aside from the last-minute rush to export as much as possible to the USA to avoid the tariffs, do businesses have clarity in the future?

What is clear is that both Japan and China hold substantial bonds and now have a gun fully loaded and could be ready to pull the trigger again with the USA having little recourse. China only exports 18% to the USA, and I’m sure Europe would benefit from any redirection of that trade.

But I’m no economist. I’m just trying to set the scene.

Regardless of what happens in the next 90 days, here are themes I’m picking up on:

We should reassess our consumerism, which is only sustainable through cheap overseas production and labour.
We should reconsider how we vote with our money. How much do you think Primark items would cost if they were not produced in Bangladesh?
We got used to paying cheap for far too long and with the likes of Temu, anybody can order a small item produced in China and delivered to your door.

If a global recession is coming and it affects the pricing of the latest iPhone or the latest tech devices, then maybe we need to focus more on the circular economy. Minimising consumption, making what we have last longer and consider opportunities to expand repair cafes. Ironically, fixing our broken devices is too expensive in our own country, but I’m sure if we can ship cheap tatter from China, we could work a way to ship our broken items abroad to be fixed and returned.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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Scaling Teams

admin@example.com — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 19:30:46 +0000

Scaling Teams

5 > 20 is a walk through the park
20 > 100 takes a toil, planning and lot of effort
100 > 500 the founding team members are going to be clueless and over stretched

While a great team culture can be instilled from the early days and with enough momentum will carry through the middle growth, do not assume it will carry through amongst hundreds without intentional team / org design.

Loving how Henry Shi is able to expand the pain or either start-up growth or corporate M&A's.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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One Five Coffee Mantra

admin@example.com — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 09:30:44 +0000

One Five Coffee Mantra

Sometimes it's good to come up with an easy to remember phrase so here is my attempt at one for one for one of my passions. Coffee.

It's widely acknowledged that one of the best investments in getting decent fresh coffee is a decent grinder and I'd like to dig a little deeper on why.

For many of us we see coffee beans and assume as I did for many years that once roasted they were akin to lentils or beans. But it reality once roasted it takes several hours to days to release the Co2 generated from roasting in a process known as de-gassing. This combined with the fact that good freshly roasted beans only retain their freshness and peak full flavour for around two weeks from roasting. Or 15 days (one five) because coffee beans are not static.

Then we move onto the grind process. As soon as beans are exposed to air they start to oxidise just as anyone who has left wine to breathe for too many will attest. That lovely fresh full flavoured wine you opened the day before will progressively start to taste like vinegar if left to the open air. So once the beans have ground it's best to use within 15 (one five) minutes. Or just grind what you're going to use.

As it turns out this also applies to green beans which are best if roasted within 18 months... or 1.5 years (one five).

And here comes my biggest frustration with how commercial mainstream coffee has been treated for years. No one in their right mind would mix an artisan made small batch vineyard of superb grapes and mix it up into a larger generic non-descript vat. And yet in Colombia where I come from most coffee farms tend to be small family owned and unlike Brazil the production is still very artisanal.

So here are some of my slightly snobby coffee mantras:

15 minutes - Only grind what you're going to use. Avoid pre-ground coffee. Who knows how long that coffee has been sitting on the shelf since roasting. It's generic anyway. You can find decent bur or conical hand grinders such as the KIN Grinder P range for £36 and half decent electric ones for £50.
15 days - If it doesn't have a roasting date I just don't buy it these days. It also pushed me the find and experience different coffee.
1.5 years - I'm fortunate to be able to have lived in Colombia or travel to Colombia frequently enough and while visiting independent coffee shops with their own roasting facilities I've managed to bag - pun intended - some really decent green beans. So every 6 months or so I dip into some artisanal home roasting with my https://zenroast.co. It takes some practice but I've very much enjoyed getting into the analog manual craft of roasting my own beans once in a while. All you need is a large metal sift and patience.

To me these are just natural limits and rhythms which I find bring joy and as I only have at least one decent coffee a day I have no issues spending 10 minutes to make it.

These days there's almost no excuse for terrible coffee at home and I'm willing to compare how much I spend vs. how much others spend on high street coffee. From Toastao, Costa, Nero or Starbucks I know I'm getting better daily bang for my money every morning.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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From billable hours to SaaS per seating pricing. AI will disrupt.

admin@example.com — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 12:11:51 +0000

From billable hours to SaaS per seating pricing. AI will disrupt.

I still remember some decades ago when SalesForce were pushing their new motto:

SalesForce.com Success. Not Software.

Back then almost all bespoke developed software included all the hassle of software maintenance and support typically charges at both 12% and 10% per annum of the total build . So it was disruptive in that sense. Never mind the thousands upon thousands of man days required to build the bespoke software and those of us building a supporting it did well.

For more than a decade I've tried to distance myself from billable hours and let's be a little honest with myself from those pesky timesheets. I had little re-lapse (but I had good reasons) a yet all along I also rang the warning bells of this out-dated business model. With the combination of AI and low-code / no-code tooling announcing the slow death to billable hours in software development.

It never really made sense for companies that sold you billable hours to also push for efficiencies and a large chunk of the AI revolution is focused on those efficiencies.

But it's potentially getting even more interesting or bleak if you're not a disruptor! As David Heinemeier Hansson brought to our attention in his opening keynote at the 2024 Rails World at the 28:33 mark, Cloud is creating an incredible markup and SaaS providers are doing it all over again on top of that cloud infrastructure.

So where does SalesForce come into this? Well at AgentForce they've announced they're moving away from per seat licensing towards a per consumption model. Bottom line? SaaS will not be able to compete when pricing models are based on value provided which in turn is closer to ROI.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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The Digital divide. Is it time for digital citizenship license?

admin@example.com — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 11:03:53 +0000

The Digital divide. Is it time for digital citizenship license?

Over the years, I've witnessed a concerning trend: friends and family falling victim to online scams. In the past month alone, I've seen three new cases, ranging from opportunistic hacks to complex scams that wreaked havoc on people's lives and finances. These incidents are a reminder that the problem is not only prevalent but also evolving in sophistication and scale.

My own experiences with online scams began with my father being targeted over a decade ago. Around the same time someone from my team discovered live banking details of those being scammed, only to be met with a lack of understanding and even criminalisation from the National Crime Agency due to lack of training. The situation has only worsened since then, with the digital divide playing a significant role in exacerbating the problem.

The divide between those with digital skills and those without has grown, and the pandemic has intensified the issue. Loneliness, made worse by COVID-19, has contributed to a rise in scams, with some victims even viewing them as expensive friendships. I had the opportunity to work with a startup from 2016 to 2018 that aimed to bridge this gap for those with health-related isolation. The World Health Organisation's declaration of loneliness as having the same impact as smoking 15 cigarettes a day highlights the severity of the issue.

Lacking social connection
can increase the risk
for premature death as
much as smoking up to
15 cigarettes a day.

Fortunately, those of us with digital know-how are somewhat protected from scams. Many of us also benefit from mandatory training on phishing and security within our organizations. However, this advantage is not shared by everyone, and the consequences can be devastating for those who fall victim to scams.

Having worked with the UK Parliament for many years I have a strong appreciation for Taiwan's pioneering efforts under its first Digital Minister in 2022.

Audrey Tang, offered a promising model for addressing this issue. Their e-participation initiatives are an inspiration, and it's possible that we need to go a step further by introducing a digital citizenship license. This would help reduce digital illiteracy, equip citizens with the necessary skills, and combat the growing threat of deep fakes and misinformation in social media spaces.

By implementing a digital citizenship license, we can empower individuals to navigate the digital world safely and responsibly, ultimately reducing the prevalence of online scams and protecting vulnerable members of our communities.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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Can we find a corner that has not been polluted?

admin@example.com — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:33:24 +0000

Can we find a corner that has not been polluted?

I am truly blessed to be able to travel quite a bit but something really hit home earlier in May during our trip to Punta Seca, Sucre 🇨🇴

Despite staying at a 2km stretch of beach that was only accessible via a 8 minute motorboat ride we found plastic pollution on the beach. Not much but still very much present.

Bear in mind we're staying at a private stretch of beach which only has 20 homes of which probably 2 more max were occupied during our stay.

But how remote? Well our uber to the airport was booked for 3:30am for 5am flight followed by more than 2 hrs drive + the last boat trip which means we arrived at 13:00 or 9.5 hours after leaving home. So it's fair to say that it's fairly remote.

And if you stay at a large beach resort the story is pretty much the same. Despite having dozens of workers cleaning the beach every morning about the same amount of rubbish slips their net and you only have to stray off the manicured resort beaches 10 mins to find remote but truly polluted beaches.

And today we learn that AWS estimates that 57% of all Internet content is now AI-generated. Mix that with the fact that AI models will collapse when using AI generated content as training data and we're facing our very microbeads pollution moment. And as much as plastic bottle manufacturers are being forced to keep their caps attached to their bottles we can imagine how this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I see several issues in had right now:

Labelling content produced by humans and otherwise
Making sure we continue to produce high quality content
The ethics surrounding both otherwise our techbro overloads will rape us before we realise it with their own intrinsic biases

It's time to recognise that we're going to have to think about cleaning our beaches and doing our active piece to solve this puzzle as part of our holidaying. We simply can't consume without contributing back.

In once sense I miss the days of Web 2.0 and even the innovation behind BitTorrent which encouraged participating by default as intrinsic to taking.

ps: I recommend reading the Open Access paper on https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493. it's just a shame it's a little to early days for www.alphaxiv.org as the authors have not claimed it no are there any comments on it yet https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v3

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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The natural constraints of the finite

admin@example.com — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 16:30:15 +0000

The natural constraints of the finite

As is frequently the case I'm inspired by the often missed smaller details in life and right now that takes form in a coffee grinder. You see our barely 2 year old electric grinder packed up and the daily morning brew grind is now powered by moi.

Don't get me wrong, I've always really enjoyed my morning brew ritual which most days consist of a single coffee so I really do not mind additional extra effort that goes into around 60 seconds of manual grinding for a single dose. But I can see this becoming an issue if you have around 5+ coffees a day or even two of you have 3+. Come think of it the power rating of my grinder back in Colombia is 120W which is probably overkill.

And let's be honest as much as I like cars and internal combustion engines can be a marvel but they're not efficient any shape or form and the Citroen Oli is an example of a 248 mile range EV out of a 40kWa battery. Just review the Citroen press release:

...oli signals an exciting leap forwards. Rather than being a 2,500kg ‘palace on wheels’ filled with screens and gadgets, oli proves that more can be achieved with less, and showcases how inventive use of responsible materials and a sustainable production process can lead to inexpensive yet desirable zero-emission vehicles that meet multiple lifestyles.

Whether it be the power rating of your grinder, the horse power of your car or the compute it requires to resolve our AI power hungriness. We're not used to paying the price of friction, waste or inefficiencies.

And all of this takes me back to a weekend I spent at a farm of some friends some years ago in Chiquinquirá, Colombia. They had chosen the countryside rhythms of life in contrast to the busy frantic city. And they built a farm they were much more intuned with natural rhythms present to all of us under the concrete jungle. A cow cannot produce milk 12 months of the year if it's ever going to re-produce a calf. They can't feed off land without rotation. And as much as a they would have loved to buy a machine to milk the cows quicker every day at 4am the farm had taught them simple basic finances which would question even the cost of the wear and tear of the belt.

And yet their day was mainly finished by late morning so where was not the ever present pressure to squeeze more out of the day.

Many of us have grown accustomed to elaborate and complex abstractions removing us from natural constraints. Many modern bean counters have elaborated complex financial systems and yet have little grasp of the cost of maintenance of the belt to automate the milking of cows.

So my challenge for all of us today is to question:

Do we understand the true cost of the compute and resources being used in AI?

It's taken us decades to understand that the fabulous cost efficiency of Cloud frequently does not add up and many tech-companies are now migrating back to bare metal servers to save money.
Is the industry subsidising and hiding the true compute cost? Do they benefit from have us hooked on their new gold rush supply?
Are we subsidising their business while they scrap and rape the finite data to feed their models? Is it sustainable once we no longer produce any new human generated content?
Good grief should I even mention governments where this can easily spiral out of control? Where is now new found independent 21st century freedom?
Where can we embrace the beautiful constraint of the finite in our every day?
How can we architect a future that leverages the finite? A future that understand and encourages sustainability?

Not all is doom and gloom. There's plenty of disruption boiling up in not so visible spaces.

Thoughts and Ideas that come to mind as we're inspired by what happens around us.

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