Noctilucent clouds on two worlds...

Daughter: Would you like one of these vitamins? Me: I've already had my middle aged man vitamins, thanks. D: I wonder what would happen if someone who wasn't a middle aged man had one of those? M: Grow luxurious ear and nose hair and start liking 6 Music, I suppose.

When a hard stare isn't enough

One of the best/worst examples I've seen of a deceptive graph

Laptops, like mammals, have a fight, flight or freeze response. To put my laptop into flight mode, I click on the right thing at the bottom of the screen. To get freeze, I just open enough browser tabs. To get fight, I try to get it to run my code.

The Ministry of Testing has kindly published something I wrote about reviewing requirements. I hope that testers and non-testers find it useful. ministryoftesting.com/articles/a6b37…

Sometimes the things presented to programmers as requirements are actually solutions. These can lead to assumptions and hidden disagreement. randomtechthoughts.blog/2023/06/17/bui…

Trees can be a good way of storing information so that you can find it quickly. But if the tree gets unbalanced it heads towards being no better than a list. Fortunately there are ways to ensure that a tree remains balanced, such as 2-3-4 trees. randomtechthoughts.blog/2023/08/06/bal…

[Blog] Just as code can be high or low quality, so can tests. One flavour of low quality is tests that don't pin the code down to have only the desired behaviour. randomtechthoughts.blog/2023/09/09/tes…

[Blog] Modulo arithmetic crops up in time, music, and the limited amount of storage for numbers in computers and odometers. Programmers are wise to watch out for this before it bites. randomtechthoughts.blog/2023/09/17/mod…

[Blog] Changing things (tariffs in smart meters, which side of the road people drive on, software versions) can be disruptive and risky. Blue/green is an approach to reduce the disruption and risk. randomtechthoughts.blog/2023/12/30/red…

[Blog] Is this a bug, a missing feature, or neither? Trying to answer this, or at least find better questions, with the aid of cars and cheesecake. randomtechthoughts.blog/2024/02/09/is-…