Occupy Hand Signals
Having grown up outside of Britain, I am already an odd bird in that, when I speak, my hands play a crucial role in how I express myself. Where I grew up we speak...
8 min readGetting Better at X
When talking about dynamics within a team we often talk about Power Dynamics, which is a term which can mean a slightly different thing to different people. My understanding of the term is that...
10 min readPairing Checklist
Psychological safety is undeniably important in every team, but it wasn’t until I joined Unruly, where we practice Extreme Programming, that I felt like psychological safety is essential for me to both produce good...
16 min readFeedback & Cake
If you were to ask me what I believe to be the single most effective practice my team has adopted over the past couple of years, hands down, it would be feedback & cake....
6 min readThe secret sauce to an effective team is a mix of Marmalade, Chutney and a little Tahini
They used to joke about my team that “It would take them six months just to agree on whether they want to use semicolons; and even then it would be open to debate for...
11 min readWhen Personal Ethics Clash With Industry Norms
Last week I had the profound pleasure of attending the first ever COED:ETHICS conference in London. A first of its kind, the organisers of this conference posed a question which has long been on...
16 min readBetting On Reason
Approximately a decade ago I found myself at a sort of crossroads. I was about to reach my notice period and was contemplating my options. Having accumulated just over seven years with my first...
17 min readThe magical quest for Componentisation
I would like, if I may, to ask you an existential question. What is the core of our job as developers today? It probably isn’t figuring out the next super cool & complex algorithm....
10 min readUsing ES6's Proxy for safe Object property access
I can’t get over the feeling that ES6 (still refusing to say ES2015 ^_^) is a kind of playground offering me all these new toys and attractions to play around with. Currently my focus...
12 min readTurning Spaghetti into Lasagne
Just over a year ago I started a project which I went into thinking ‘I’m not sure how to do this’ and now, a year and a half later, it is finally almost done...
8 min readWhy on earth would you create yet another package manager for Javascript?
I recently got asked this question by a coworker…. as I tried to explain I found myself going back four years to my next to last job, where I developed the component I recently...
13 min readSimmer.js: A Javascript reverse CSS selector engine
As Front End developers we use CSS selector engines all the time. Most commonly, Sizzle, which is baked into jQuery. The selector engine provides us with a comfortable way to search for elements on...