One of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is to talk to your team every day. It sounds simple, but it’s often overlooked, especially in distributed teams. Daily conversations help build and maintain relationships, foster trust, and remind your team that they matter as people, not just as task-completers. Let’s be clear: this isn’t a psychological experiment. There’s no hidden agenda or behavioral study behind it. It’s simply about genuine care and human connection. But what should you talk about? It doesn’t have to be complicated. Ask how they are, how their family is, or how life outside work is going. The point isn’t the topic, it’s the connection. I usually start with something like: “Hullo! How’s things?” It often takes a few tries before people realise I’m genuinely asking about them, not their current task. A colleague once raised a concern: Doesn’t this feel like micromanaging? It’s a fair question, and the answer lies in how you do it. This isn’t about checking up ...
Beyond the Code: Designing Services That Stand the Test of Time Wednesday, 4th February 2026 St Aldates Tavern, 108 Saint Aldate's, Oxford @ 6pm RSVP As software engineers, it’s easy to get lost in the excitement of implementing clever business logic: the algorithms, the workflows, the elegant domain models. But the success (or failure) of a service rarely hinges on its core logic alone. What really separates a fragile prototype from a resilient, scalable system is everything that happens around that logic: the invisible scaffolding that shapes how a service behaves, communicates, and recovers when things go wrong. In this session I’ll explore the often-overlooked aspects of building robust services. The decisions that make the difference between smooth operations and painful refactors months down the line. I’ll unpack how thoughtful design choices early on can pay dividends in maintainability, observability, and security later. Whethe...