I was thinking last night about how when I wanted an entry level job drafting, I journalled that I would get one. Once I got it, I settled and stopped journalling about anything, forgot about the bigger picture. Then when I wanted to start up my own firm, I journalled a strategy for it months […]

New Year’s resolution status: Daily journalling is going strong, reading a book a week is proving to be challenging (reading books takes forever!). Still committed though, will try to make up for it as soon as possible. If I get to the end only having read one a fortnight, I won’t be too cut up […]

I had the chance to visit and give a talk at Central Australian College (CAC) in Hobart last November about the civil design and engineering industry. I put together this list of resources that I can’t live without, that I wish somebody showed me when I was trying to learn civil design ‘from the outside’. […]

Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner is an awesome blast from the past (maybe Windows 95 will save the world?), but it’s also a great deterrent from the idea that we can achieve all of our aims if we just author more and more systems. The idea that sticks with me is that of […]

If there’s one good thing that came out of spending too much time playing Overwatch over the holidays, it’s a consideration for team composition. When you are a small team about to face a slew of chaotic situations, it pays to have all the roles filled, or at least to know what role you are […]

(As someone who is useless at chess), is there anything more ominous than playing against an AI and seeing the red ‘BLUNDER’ message show up after your move? What if we could review our real-life actions with that much clarity and immediacy to get us back on track? Project post-mortems are better than nothing, but […]

Surprising and unexpected things are great for marketing. Delivering projects has zero room for surprises, and expectations must be met precisely. If you get the sense that somebody is marketing (i.e. BSing) to a client when they are supposed to be delivering, something has gone very wrong.

The nastiest design problems I’ve encountered aren’t the ones I was totally ignorant to – unless you’re working completely outside of your competency, there shouldn’t be enough of those to cause too much havoc, and there’s usually some leeway for latent conditions. They are the ones known but not acknowledged, the ones you notice once […]

I have a fuzzy recollection of some news circa 2010 that Microsoft acquired some technology developed by a teenager for a multi-million dollar figure (I always remembered it as Microsoft Silverlight but I think my wires are crossed because that’s what Line Rider was built with). Even though the specifics are lost to time, I […]