I shall die one day I suppose
In this old Turkish house I inhabit:
A ragged banana-leaf outside and here
On the sill in a jam-jar a rock-rose.

Perhaps a single pining mandolin
Throbs where cicadas have quarried
To the heart of all misgivings and there
Scratches on silence like a pet locked in.

Will I be more or less dead
Than the village in memory’s dispersing
Springs, or in some cloud of witness see,
Looking back, the selfsame road ahead?

By the moist clay of a woman’s wanting, …

Design from zero to achieve simplicity; don’t endeavour to reduce the complex.

I use this heuristic in software engineering for both code and project level tasks. I apply it to all tasks; whether they should take a couple of hours or several months to complete.

Systems have realities: design, constraints, and behaviours. Some are written down, some are unintentional, and some we’ll never discover. We want to make a significant change to a software system. Our goal is to design a …

I made a tool to visualise the file structure of git repositories: Longitude . The inspiration comes from work where I wanted to overlay team ownership across files and directories in some of the large monolithic code bases.

It’s very much an MVP and is a nights-and-weekends project. I’ve got a couple of ideas for the future:

• The option to size nodes based on lines of code in each file and directory.
• Utilise categories for file extension.
• Colour or size nodes based on LOC churn in …

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive – don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with …