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What I Learned Sharing Product Experiments with City College Students

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  A few months ago, Shaun Lowthorpe put out a call on LinkedIn for people willing to share real‑life experiences of using business analysis at work. Although I haven’t done what you’d call traditional business analysis for years, I work in a Product led organisation, and I love getting up in front of a room and talking. So I volunteered, and Shaun kindly accepted. I wanted to show how we use tools like Amplitude to test and measure the impact of user interface enhancements. After chatting with colleagues, I put together a short ten minute presentation about some of the A/B experiments we’d run to improve the guest booking details experience. I’d never presented this kind of material on my own before, so it was a little daunting. I was keen to make sure I had the details right, especially in case I was hit with any tricky questions. Presenting can be unpredictable. Sometimes my energy doesn’t quite match the mood of the room, even after I’ve got them all to grin and wave for a pho...
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AI: Assisted Ignorance with Dom Davis

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There’s something about Dom . It’s not only his depth of knowledge of the topics he speaks about. It’s his charisma and his delivery too. This is why people flock to see him. It also helps that Dom has been obsessed (in a good way) with AI for as long as I can remember. He always feels ahead of the game and I frequently learn a lot. Tonight, giving his “AI: Assisted Ignorance” talk, he started in the obvious place by reframing the Terminator story into a Software Engineering context. He then went on to show us how flawed it is and demonstrated how we shouldn’t be worried about it taking our jobs - at least not yet. There is of course the current junior developer crises, but that will soon come good when companies realise they’ll have no one to replace the senior devs who are retiring or going off to earn millions fixing other companies' AI disasters. Millenium bug anyone? The really important message was that AI doesn’t reason. It doesn’t think. It’s autocorrect on steroids, a prob...
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My nor(DEV):con 2026

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I’ve been to nor(DEV):con , East Anglia’s Largest Developer Conference , most years since its inception as syncConf in 2013. 2026 has been by far my favorite year, and not just because I had the opportunity to speak to a packed conference room with standing room only! Learning Go by becoming a drone pilot - Andrew Haine When Andrew first posted about his keynote at nor(DEV):con, it was just too easy to tease him he’d be droning on about Go ! Fortunately for me, he saw the funny side! In reality the talk was interesting, and expertly and charismatically delivered. Especially considering that there’d been a fairly major technology failure just before Andrew started. So he couldn’t share his laptop on the main screen. However, we did see him control a small drone hovering just above the stage and even saw it take a picture, all through code. Learning Python to buy shoes: A tale of studying, selectors and sneakers - Isaac Oldwood Isaac is one of the up and coming stars of the Eastang...
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Radical Candor: Everyone should read this book, but it could be a lot better.

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I was recommended Radical Candor as a more contemporary take on Marshall B. Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication , but I think it also works as a more up‑to‑date reference for much of the material covered in What Did You Say? The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback by Charles N. Seashore, Edith Whitfield Seashore, and Gerald M. Weinberg . It even overlaps with, and offers a different angle on the One Minute Manager series by Ken Blanchard . I learnt a few new things which I think will be really useful. I especially liked  Care personally, challenge directly , encouraging feedback from your team early on, the discussion of why boss is the proper term and the three questions you should ask your team to understand them and where they want to be. I’m already using the terms Rock Star and Super Stars as a result of reading Radical Candor. I didn’t like the strong emphasis on 121s, especially the frequency and the perceived importance. To me this is plain wrong and should be replaced ...
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Shift - Silo Book 2

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  I didn’t enjoy Shift as much as the Wool . In a few places it still gripped me when parts of the overarching story were hinted at and later on explained. It was great to know where the Silos came from and why, but I didn’t care at all about Mission and I struggled to care about Solo beyond the penultimate chapter where he encounters Juliet, and brings the stories from the two books together. It’s quite a different story style compared to Wool, and even more dystopian. There’s no TV series to compare it to yet - that’s coming. It’s the middle book of a trilogy, so it is already starting on the back foot. I’ll get to the third book in time and hopefully there’ll be a happy ending. Hugh Howey  ISBN-13: 978-1804940839
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A 'Smashing' night with ACCU Oxford: Beyond the Code

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On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of speaking to ACCU Oxford about ‘Beyond the Code: Designing Services That Stand the Test of Time’.   I haven’t been to Oxford since 2012 when the ACCU Conference was held there, before it was moved to Bristol the following year. Oxford was as I remembered it and remained pretty much where I had left it. ACCU Oxford takes place in a lovely little pub called St Aldates Tavern , in a room upstairs called the blue room. It was a really nice space, up and away from the main pub with its own bar, tables and a large TV on the wall. However, it appears the TV may have shown someone’s team losing and that someone decided to take it out on the TV. A large part of the screen didn’t work, but there was enough to get the gist of my slides across to my audience. The audience was great! Laughed in all the right places, asked lots of questions, and completely ripped my logging examples to shreds. ‘Beyond the code…’ is intended for the ACCU conference , so i...
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[nor(DEV):con] Beyond the Code: Designing Services That Stand the Test of Time - 26 February 2026

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  Beyond the Code:  Designing Services That Stand the Test of Time  Wednesday, 26th February 2026 @ 13:45   nor(DEV):con The Kings Centre,  63-75 King St, Norwich NR1 1PH   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, observabi...
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