Book

I am not a fan of baseball and I will not be wearing a yellow tuxedo.

I have just finished re-reading the book The Spark, a fictional account of a sports agent and his journey to learn about Cirque de …

The top shelf of books in my study has the books that have had the most impact on me or that I have enjoyed reading the most.

I read a lot of books. Last year I read over 50 books and this year I am heading towards 40 books.

I’ve written a lot about questions, and answers.

In the book Questions are the answer there is a quote from Peter Drucker:

We often equate pressure with stress and vice versa.

This article has a nice definition of the difference:

Being productive is sometimes more about mind management than time management.

In 2018, Andrew Barnes’ company, Perpetual Guardians, permanently introduced a four day week (FDW). The staff would get 100% pay but work 80% of the time as long as they hit 100% of their …

Estimation is a very difficult task - depending on what is being estimated.

Could you be bold enough to delete all the meetings in your calendar?

When I am developing software I build an internal mental model of how I expect things to work. As I learn more I tweak that model - or if it is not working as I expect then I tweak the code to match …

I am not an artist and I have limited knowledge of art but I recently enjoyed a TV series and I am currently reading a book related to the subject.

The simple use of the phrase “how might we” can open up design discussions and improve company mission statements.

Maybe it is my upbringing but I always try to be on time for things.

In the book Excellent Advice for Living, Kevin Kelly identifies the importance of habits.

It is easy to decide that you can’t do something.

Ego and the fear of how we appear to others can get in the way sometimes. We don’t want to appear stupid so we avoid finding out things we don’t know.

The butterfly effect famously states that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly somewhere in the world can impact the weather on the other side of the world - a small change can have a huge impact …

How do we move from solving downstream reactive problems to upstream proactive solutions?

In the book 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman he talks about an effect called “Spontaneous Trait Transference”.

My daughter sometimes works as a waitress at the local Pizza Express. If she has a good night then sometimes she can earn more in tips than her wages (although that is not very often).

I am a lark.

In the book Time Wise by Amantha Imber she discusses the three main types of people and their alertness through various times …

Adding an alert or alarm for a situation you need to monitor should be a good thing but sometimes, depending on how it is done, it can actually make things worse or at a minimum not work as expected.

Took me a little while to get into this book. It starts out in a school where a pupil spots a spaceship from his favourite video game. This then moves on to it being a precursor to an invasion by the …

I had read a lot of good things about this book and it had sat on my Kindle for a long time. Really enjoyed the first half of the book but thought the second half was more focused on things that …

I’ve had this book a while but never got around to reading it properly. One of my colleagues at work was listening to the audio version of it and recommended it. This was an excellent read and …

This story documents one scenario that could happen when the nightmare happens of a massive power cut across Europe. It starts with a number of threads and weaves them well together. It follows an …

I really liked Simon Sinek’s other books but didn’t get into this one as much - don’t get me wrong, it is still an excellent read and you can learn a lot.

I was really looking forward to this book as I had listened to a podcast where they explained the ideas behind it. The two authors run a design course in Stanford that gets massively oversubscribed …

At the moment I am having to get up to speed on a bunch of technologies relating to “DevOps”. This includes Kubernetes. I borrowed this book from a colleague and read it over the course of …

On 12th June 1984 I was on a family holiday in the US. We had spent three weeks travelling around Florida and then up the east coast to finally end up in Boston. During the day we had a guided tour of …