(Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash) I work with several extremely competent people. The kind of people who appear naturally effortless at what they do – coding, running projects or businesses, writing, conversation – you name it, I know somebody who is excellent at it. I’ve been fortunate that this has been the case a number of times...

As programmers we educate ourselves to a high degree about the internal operations of the platforms that we work with. We acquire knowledge about the structure and data flow in the frameworks and libraries that we use. We develop intuitions about how complex systems fit together, and know how we can influence those systems to...

5 Yoga Poses Every Programmer Should Try In case you didn’t already know, sitting is the new smoking. It’s also a pretty prominent feature of most coder’s lives. Coding is a stationary, chair-bound activity for the most part (unless you have a fancy stand-up desk). Coding jobs require you to occupy your chair for hours on...

Beginning I’ve fallen in and out of love with code a hundred times. When I was ten, I was impressed and mystified by the ZX Spectrum that my father left plugged into our family TV set (imagine that!) on the morning of my birthday. It was one of the earliest attempts at accessible mass-market computing,...

How to optimise your experience of life One of the things I’m most concerned about in life is opti mising my experience. I want my work life, my free time, and my relationships to be packed full of value, meaning, and fun. It’s a bare fact that we’re not here for long in cosmic terms...

I almost lost my mind once. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I almost lost my mind because I wasn’t taking care of it. Way too much crunch time for an important project, coupled with some ongoing issues in my personal life, pushed my ability to cope with day-to-day life into...