I took a couple of books away with me on holiday this summer. The first was Steve Jobs biography, I’ve been reading this forever, since April 2012. It’s one of those books I’d only pick up when travelling and I was determined to finish it during the my 10 day break in Mexico. I figured that wasn’t enough reading material so I also picked up a copy of Hidden Value.
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My employer has had a recruiting drive over the last few months. Having been interviewer maybe 30 times throughout my career I thought I’d document some of the recurring mistakes candidates make. None of these points are ground breaking, just common sense – yet many candidates still make them!
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I’ve just finished reading Tom DeMarco‘s Slack, a book aimed at dissolving the myth that total efficiency within an organisation is “a good thing”.

This book is more general than Peopleware, DeMarco’s software development oriented book (which I found to be a more engaging read, probably because I’m a developer).
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Thursday was my last day at Alexander Street Press. I was given a great leaving present by Paul Dixon and the UK development team, a signed A1 poster of the company logo generated with 30,000 lines of the 275,000 line PHP code base I’ve been contributing to over the past 4 years I’ve worked there. Read the rest of this entry »

This was my first week in my new job and on an iMac. I was looking forward to trying out OSX, I’ve seen OSX grow in popularity over the last year or two in the development community, a lot of the screen casts are done on Macs.

I was told by others in the office that I’d be sold on Mac within the first day or two because “its much better than Windows”. After a week on it though I still find OSX gets in the way. Read the rest of this entry »

When Zend released their certification in 2004 I promptly picked up their study guide in October 2004 (along with MySQL’s study guide). However, even now I’m still not certified, I’ve studied the material but never booked the exam. When I stumbled across this thread it reminded why I never booked the exam. Read the rest of this entry »