Why Remote Work Just Works (for Me)

When I started working as a programmer, my days began with a ritual that felt entirely normal at the time: over an hour of inbound commuting into the city, and then another long outbound journey home. Time, energy, money — all drained in the process. It was the cost of doing business, or so I thought.

Then the pandemic hit, and everything changed. Practically overnight, that daily routine vanished. The entire company transitioned to remote work in just a few days. Luckily, we had already laid some of the groundwork — tools, systems, and workflows that supported remote access. All we had to do was scale up.

And it worked. Customers experienced very little disruption, and internally, we barely missed a beat.

Now, years later, we’re still working remotely. And — here’s the thing — it still works.

Not just for the company, but for me. Personally. Deeply. In ways I didn’t expect.

  

More Time, More Focus, Less Waste

The first and most obvious benefit? I got my time back. No more two-hour round trips, no more standing on packed trains or sitting in traffic. That reclaimed time went straight back into my life — and into my work.

I’m more productive now. I’m more focused. I’m in control of my time, my energy, my attention. Sure, life shows up — a doorbell, a neighbour, or an unexpected distraction — but the tradeoff is still massively in my favour. I’ve spent time building out a dedicated workspace at home, optimized for deep concentration and comfort. It’s not a makeshift setup at the kitchen table. It’s mine, and it’s built for what I do.

With that setup, and without the daily grind of commuting, I find I spend more time at my desk, more time on task, and the quality of that time is better. It's not just about more hours; it's about more effective hours. My brain arrives to work fresh instead of depleted.

 

The Return-to-Office Push: A Puzzle

Despite all of this, there’s a message echoing out there in the corporate world: return to the office. The tone ranges from gentle encouragement to stern mandates. But I keep asking myself — why?

Why bring people back into expensive office buildings? Why shoulder the cost of maintaining spaces built for humans — with their endless needs for coffee, heating, lighting, safety drills, and ergonomic chairs — when the alternative is already working?

If a company needs physical infrastructure, great. Build a tech hub. Keep your servers somewhere secure, your dev environments humming. Machines don’t need water coolers or office parties. But humans — we’ve figured out how to work remotely, and for many of us, it’s been a genuine upgrade.

The Uncomfortable Truths?

Maybe not everyone shares this experience. Maybe not every job translates well to remote work. Maybe some people don’t have a dedicated space at home, or they’re working at the kitchen counter while the family or flatmates buzz around. Maybe their productivity really has dropped.

And maybe, just maybe, some of the voices calling us back to the office are those for whom remote work didn’t feel good — or didn’t look productive from their side of the camera. Managers who are used to seeing bums on seats might feel unease when they can’t “see” work happening.

I get it. It’s hard to manage outcomes instead of hours. It’s hard to trust that people are working when you can’t walk by their desk. But is that really a reason to ignore all the gains?

  

What Does the Data Say?

I’d love to dive into studies on this — real data about productivity in remote vs. office environments. But I want more than just headline numbers. I want to know:

• What kind of work were people doing?

• Did they have a dedicated workspace at home?

• Were they experienced at remote work, or thrust into it overnight?

Because I believe my personal productivity boost comes not just from being home, but from investing in a space that lets me focus, and in habits that support remote productivity. Without that, maybe the experience would be different.

 

It’s Not One-Size-Fits-All

This isn’t a blanket statement that everyone should work remotely, or that every company should shut its offices. But it is a reminder that — for many of us — the shift to remote wasn’t a compromise. It was an evolution.

We cut out inefficiencies, reduced stress, and created more sustainable workdays. And that’s not nothing.

So, when I hear the call to return to the office, I pause. Not out of resistance, but out of honest curiosity: What are we returning for? Is it about culture? Control? Collaboration?

Because if it’s about productivity — well, for some of us, remote work already won that argument.

 

My Conclusion

Remote work isn’t perfect. But it’s real, and it’s working. At least for me — and I suspect for many others too.

Maybe it’s time to stop viewing remote work as a temporary measure or a compromise, and start treating it as what it has proven to be: a legitimate, powerful, and in many cases superior way to work.

Let’s be thoughtful. Let’s look at the data. Let’s listen to the wide variety of experiences out there.

But let’s not forget: commuting two hours a day wasn’t normal. It was just what we got used to.

 

Wiley IT Manager Saving on Microsoft Licences

It is late 1998 and I observe one of the smartest PC acquisition steps ever; the company I work for is reequipping every one using a certain application to a new specification machine.  This means a major purchase and roll out for those of us in IT.

A little background first the company I work for has one customer, just one single customer, this may sound crazy but at the time it made perfect sense and the customer was a reassuring British stalwart of the high street the business was rock solid.  They were however also extremely protective of their brand and selling our whole product line exclusively they knew they could tell us how to do everything.

One of the key things they specified was a hard encryption model to their stock and control system software, we had to run the software they provided, we had to run is with "secure" physical dongles performing periodic security authorisation checks and we did all this on a specification of machine they laid down to us.

So it was in 1998 a new version of this software was hoving into view, the specification leapt from a mere 486 running 25hmz to a Pentium III running at or over 120mhz.  The RAM requirements went from 4MB and windows 3.11 for workgroups to the then brand new Windows 98.

So it was my boss (shout out to Dave) set about working out the best platform for this.

He had previously been in charge of the purchase of new server stack from Compaq and with a positive impression he turned to them.

With a little wrangling I believe he had a roll out of 30 machines, with three years support, for £890.  In terms today this is approximately £2000 a seat and was just for the machine a 17" monitor, keyboard, mouse and windows 98.  Nothing else.

Folks had to do other tasks on these machines, not just this customer software, therefore he set about buying Office.  Homogenising the previous smorgasbord array of different spreadsheet and word processing software variously in use.

Adding Office 97 SBE unfortunately pushed the machines up another £80 per seat, this included £19 off for bulk purchase, but it was a crazy price.

But then Dave taught me an extremely valuable lesson, to play the edge cases.

Could you get Office 97 for les than £80?  Yes, you could get it for £49.95 a seat.  But only if it was an upgrade.  Hmm, what could we count as an upgrade from?

Well, it turned out Office 97 could be an upgrade from MS Works 95.  At the time Works was my go to office package, I've never felt the ease and familiarity with office ever again since.  But works was canned by Microsoft; probably because of Wiley IT managers like Dave.

For a full new copy of Works would be had for just £12.95.

Doing a little mathematics, £12.95 + £49.95 is a mere £62.90.

The company was already duty bound to pay me as part of my regular services, so installing Works and installing Word over the top, taking hours to get through all the machine did result in quite a saving.  About £400 for the whole project; meaning Dave was well under budget and everything worked as intended.

It did however leave one literally huge problem; for the next working year our already tiny IT office was overrun with these dozens of double boxes of Works and Office upgrade, just in case Redmond came knocking asking about licenses.

My Worst Development Argument Ever

I have had a really excellently interesting sprint with the work I'm currently doing, like you know one of those sprints where you get a real technical tooth into the pie of problems.

That however is neither an interesting story, nor one I can actually tell.

Instead I will fling my mind back a score of years and we'll discuss THE WORST DEVELOPMENT ARGUMENT I HAVE EVER HAD!

The problem started with the platform I was then working on, it was a quite low-powered single core Celeron PC base, running a favour of Windows for Embedded systems (I think it was Windows 2000 Embedded), but it was basically used as a host for a C# application stack which itself was more or less a wrapper around a C hardware driver talking to the various light, button and money handling mechanisms in the machine.

This system of ours then simply would process launch, at the shell level, another child process which was the actual game content.  And there were lots of different games we could fire up.

Our menu and the hardware polling all would back off, it was actually only polling for button and light IO and every second polling for cash changes from money physically being entered; so that was slow to update, but otherwise it was fine and backed off.

Being a Win32 environment it was fairly easy to back off most all the threading and just launch the child process.

Our testing showed that we had a 92/8% CPU split, the system would take on average 8% CPU whilst in this active child mode; it had a few spikes and it had a few troughs, that included windows itself.  Otherwise it was pretty much that most all the CPU was available to the child process.

It was therefore with some scepticism that we had the development manager in the content area wonder over complaining that one of his guys was having issues getting smooth frame rates from the platform.  We accepted the install and ran the child process, indeed we immediately saw the issue.

A popular UK TV show game, with a target circling the board...

The target would stagger and slew around, this was immediately explained to us that the system was so busy the game was being forced to drop frames, the frame rate icon the game had programmed into it went up and down like a pair of kangaroo's in the mating season.  This was the whole argument, our game drops frames your system takes too much time on the CPU.

It has to be pointed out that our manual actually said we only make 75% of the system time available to the game, our demonstrating we were making over 90% available was well within tolerance, and this is the only game showing this kind of issue.  We were therefore skeptical about the claims being made; especially about the high quality and tested nature of their content executable.

After an amount of head scratching we decided to measure how often the "Present" function was being called in DirectX, a little hackery later and we had a measure... Was Present being called consistently and then the system not presenting, or was the game itself changing the length of time a frame took, staggering when it presented?

Yes, the game itself was almost immediately measured to be staggering how often it called Present.  So the question came up "When you move these items are you interpolating between the position and so smoothing where the target is?  Or are you moving them a fixed distance each frame?"

"The frames are a fixed length"... The developer and their manager said.  We had just measured and shown that the frames were changing length, we couldn't look at their code, so we'd had to hack about but we'd shown their code was calling the present with the same staggering it was not a fixed frame rate as they said it should be.

We video recorded (literally with a camera on a tripod) measured the frames on the camera and calculated the stutter.  Then measured with our test harness when present was being called and saw a direct match, when they called present the present happened.  Our conclusion, the only conclusion really, was the content executable needed to be calling present more consistently; or their DirectX present be set up to sync with the screen or something.

The argument then began, they insisted that their game was presenting at a fixed interval, it was fixed to 30 FPS; they refused to turn on VSync, their platform did not allow this setting to be part of the DirectX initialise... It really should have been.  But we had explained the staggering, the delay in present being called, neither were o do with the system all appeared to be in their code.

"But the system is taking 100% CPU"

Yes at this point three member of my department all pulled this face:

It has to be said the manager in charge of this developer is perhaps the worst development manager I've ever met, a man so inept he alienated and lost developers at a prolific rate, who spent £40,000 on migrating to Perforce rather than paying his team and just using git.  Who seemed to think he could pick up modern development techniques by osmosis.

The developer himself?  Well, lets see how he handled all this evidence from the camera footage....

That's right, he lost his shit.

Despite myself, a coworker and our manager all confirming our observations that the hitching and stuttering were coming from the child process itself seeming to go idle and so it calling present at differing intervals he clearly took this to be a personal attack.  He stood in our development lab and basically tore into our system; our whole team took a verbal berating at this juniors gob and his manager relished it (this was one of the earliest examples I saw of this manager relishing in his minions going to town on others instead of his reeling them in).

Rocked by their insistence and being in the unhappy situation of having to prove our innocence our manager asked for us to be able to review their code.  They refused.  There were some issues, because our company had just conjoined with the place this developer worked with, they still saw us as interlopers.

My colleague was known to be somewhat more volatile than myself, so our manager left me on this horrible issue, trying to figure out what was wrong.

Come the Friday, and a little exacerbated after two days, I started to decompile their executable.  It appeared to me that their main loop was miss-behaving, it seemed to be just calling Sleep with a fixed value on top of the work it had carried out each loop.  And sleep takes a variable amount of time.... It was not taking a check of how long their update took and then sleeping for the difference to meet the frame rate target and then it dawned on me.... Did you spot it too?

They were calling SLEEP.

The Win32 API documentation literally says sleep is not a fixed interval, it relinquishes your thread for the remainder of your time slice up to or more than the sleep time given, returning when the windows scheduler next wishes to make your thread active.

It still says similar today, the time slept is not guaranteed.

This client process main function seemed to be calling sleep with a fixed value each pass, it was hardcoded into the executable.  If you sleep for X+Unknown, you are going to see exactly this staggering.  Our demo child application has a busy wait, it never slept, it yielded by passing a sleep of zero (which make it give up its time slice but remain ready, and it would more or less always be rescheduled before the fixed frame rate next time point, plus we interpolated our animation example).

This child process was just proving more and more to not be to specification.

Their manager insisted it was to spec... Which was very frustrating, as he grandly declared "I have read the code, I know it is correct" and "when we run it, we do not see this issue".

It felt like a fundamental miss-understanding, none of the folks on the team I was within were being treated with any respect, nor acknowledging our collective experience and understanding.

I stewed on this all Friday, come the Monday things were getting fractious.  This game had to be out!  It came up in the master development round up that this game was held up by our system.  This started the direct antagonism.

Everything I did, everything other members of the team did, all showed this content application was just staggering and stuttering on it's own volition, by design, by intent it staggered.  It was not our system!

To prove this I therefore set about writing a harness, which would just give the client process the same DLL to load, but they were all stubbed out calls, and it would run WITHOUT our system.  The content could be tested locally and checked.  We got one of the same Celeron PC's, just a flat install of the OS and double clicked my harness.... Sure enough the game staggered about in the exact same way!

I presented a A4 page example and showed how the loop in our example application worked, explaining that Sleep is not a fixed time interval and a busy loop should be used with a yield not a time span anyway.  I recorded this with my harness and their game, I presented both recordings too.

The developer went apoplectic....

He literally shouted at me that Sleep was guaranteed to come back after that amount of time, and when he ran my DLL shim locally it ran really smoothly.

He was right, it did, but he had a much different dual core machine with 4GB of RAM and a graphics card.  Our platform was a single core Celeron 1GB of RAM and built-in Intel graphics shared vram, in short very different.

At this point the director who sat between my manager and this development manager ordered that I be allowed to look at their code.

The worse development argument I have ever had then hit a peak, as I walked over, flanked by my manager and their manager.  I lent over his shoulder and pointed to the sleep function and said that is not going to be a fixed period.

That was all I said, he never let me explain any further, he just went MENTAL!  He started shouting, screaming, and called me a few choice names.  He would not accept all the evidence that his loop was not a fixed length, that it was changing from frame to frame, he just could not figure out that:

{

    UpdateStuff();

    Render();

    Sleep(33);

}

Was not going to always take a fixed amount of time, first of all I pointed out that doing anything and then sleeping like this will be the time the work takes plus at least 33, and then there was no guarantee that the sleep would immediately come back.  The windows scheduler would decide when you can come back after at minimum that amount of time rounded to the nearest platform tick.

His manager immediately backed him up and agreed with him, they both talked down to me.  They insisted loudly and angrily that sleep was fixed and the functions they have took such a trivial amount of time they were not worth measuring.... 

Even my manager backed me up here, of course doing a function call, any function, will take some amount of time and they need to take that into account.

I had just had these two idiots literally shouting at me, whilst I had to stay so calm, it took an icy handful of minutes for them to accept the argument that 33+N is > 33 where N is none zero.  It was just fundamental and they were not having it.

Their code became:

{

    startTime = Now();

    UpdateStuff();

    Render();

    endTime = Now();

    Sleep(33 - (endTime - startTime));

}

Slightly better, but we still saw hitches and stutters, they were far far less frequent now.

This massive drop in frequency I immediately and without changing my argument pointed me to the sleep, as I said the sleep is not a fixed time, it was not going to sleep for X and come immediately back, that's not how Windows worked.

Their argument was that Sleep was fixed, that it was guaranteed to return after X.

They were very loud, very obnoxious and very adamant.

We returned to the developers desk:  "Show me why you think Sleep is fixed".

I expected him to bring up some code, some harness, some proof of his thinking.  Instead he opened Internet Explorer, went to MSDN and showed me the Sleep function documentation.

Sure enough it said "fixed interval".  He was so smug.  So infuriatingly smug.  His manager was ultra smug too.

I reached down, scrolled the mouse and pointed to the screen.... 

He was reading Sleep in the Windows Mobile SDK.  He's right on Windows Mobile sleep is a fixed interval.  However, we're not on Windows Mobile are we.

My manager looked at the screen, I looked at the screen, they looked at the screen.  And immediately the developer called me a horrible name, yup, just straight up called me a name.

I have to admit I didn't react well, fisty-cuffs didn't happen, though the way he erupted out of his seat raging I expected the guy to swing for me.

He could not take it, his manager still argued he was right, so invested in their mistake were they that they could not admit their miss-understanding.  The manager always claiming he only hired the best minds, this guy being quite arrogant and the whole lot of them generally being very dismissive of both myself and the department to which I belonged.

I walked away with my head up high.  My manager stood and pair programmed with both their manager and their developer for maybe twenty minutes and a new version of the content executable quietly appeared without any stutter; even when we ran obrut!

It was a horrible moment in my time with that employer, I remember how the guy never apologised, that development manager never apologised and the game went out without any further delay, but they never received any censure for the episode.

Our department also never shook this kind of effect either, for some reason because their manager had gone to bat for them from the off every following time a performance issue arose we had to prove everything to the Nth degree without ever seeing the other side doing the same.  Very rarely was it ever truly our issue.

I have never forgotten, I have never forgiven.

When you foul up, just admit it, owning it and learning from it is far more wholesome than being uptight and obtuse.

Noise Generators & The Conservatory (Work)

That moment you tell someone you're going to go do some programming work in the conservatory during a rain storm and their mind melts as they can't figure how the sound of rain helps with your concentrating and keeping the alpha brain waves flowing....

I use noise generators whilst I'm working all the time, such as this one:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/campingRainNoiseGenerator.php

And I really like this one:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/thunderNoiseGenerator.php

But my favourite is this:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/primevalEuropeanForestSoundscapeGenerator.php

They're works of genius.

And as the new lock-down looms I'm relying on them more and more for that little taste of the outdoors whilst stick in doors.

That Work Life Split Under Covid

With the lockdown and working from home I'm finally doing something I always thought I wanted to do, work from home.  I'd always had the niggling thought I could be more efficient and it would be really good to be able to work from home.  Oh my... Oh Me Oh My How wrong was I?!

The first elephant in the room, work-life-balance, I work in my home office, my home office where I write this blog and make silly videos and play and read... And... so when I've been in it 8+ hours a day, I don't want to look at it any more... I don't sit at my office desk craving to be home chomping on some private project, because I'm already at that home desk and the lines have been blurred.

Second, the family... Specifically (sorry love) the wife... She's no concept of being in the zone, as a programmer, when you're in the zone and been doing something niggly all day and everything is finally falling into place, no matter the time, you stick at it to get done... No, my wife can't comprehend this, she doesn't understand everytime she shouts "Come on now"... It's another 20 minutes because you just mentally ravaged my trail of thought... Put headphones on?... Yeah you don't know how loud my Mrs is.

Third, hours... I touched on it a little above, but there's no quantitative way to express what you're up to.  I feel, quite strongly, that if you're not producing something (like code) and being seen to, you're looking absent from the work place... You're at home, not right there doing your thing.  Recall, I'm quite used to sitting typing for hours on end with folks wondering quite why my keyboard is so loud.  I get a lot of feedback from that presence in the moment in the office.  Without that feedback, I'm feeling more than a little fraudulent, especially as when software engineering tends to do, things go awry and you're then asking for more time... I've literally had 2 weeks on a project, then a week off (yes, I had a week off at home) and then I returned and asked for another 2 weeks... and I'm pretty much about to ask for yet another... based on the original 2 week estimate I over egged this pudding... But I have been working frenetically, except I feel on the other side... they might not see it that way.

Fourth, being somewhere else, this might sound obvious, but I'd never appreciated it, rolling out of bed stretching, getting a coffee and walking a few steps into my chair always felt like bliss, when I did it of a weekend and got on with some project it always felt so right and clean.  Now, it's sullied, it's forced upon me, it's the norm... and to be honest, it's doing my head in.  I miss the commute, the hour to decompress either way.... I miss that moment where I get to just be in my own head, in my own space in the car on the tram or just walking.

Whether that last part of the pre-virus world ever returns, I could not say.

Personal PC Kit Stock Take - And First new PC Part Purchase

It begins.... A new PC build.

Yes, its that time, I simply need more power in my workstation on my desk.  I've been farming more and more work off to servers throughout the house, and I did a stock take... of all my kit... I've not done this since the house move, and indeed I documented the last stock take on these pages.

Workstation

Xeon X5670 (6 core, 12 thread) - 32GB RAM - Used all the time

Single Socket Servers

Xeon L5640 (6 core, 12 thread)- 8GB RAM - DistCC slave, Git Host & Fire Host - Used Rarely

Core 2 Duo E6750 (2 core, 2 thread) - 4GB RAM - General always on server (VPN Machine for Chaplain)

Dual Socket Servers

Xeon E5240 (2 core x 2) - 16GB RAM - Dist CC slave, Squid Host, Proxmox Host - Used Rarely

Xeon E5250 (2 core x 2) - 16GB RAM - Dist CC slave, Wow Classic Staging server - Used Rarely

Xeon E5430 (4 core x 2) - 32GB RAM - Dist CC, Dell BMC Test bed, ZFS mirror, Docker container host - Always On

Xeon E5430 (4 core x 2) - 32GB RAM - Xen Server Host.

Xeon E5340 (4 core x 1) - No RAM - Spares for other Dell Boxes

Xeon E5-2620 (6 core, 12 thread x 2) - 128GB RAM - DistCC build coordinator, main server - always on

It has to be said, nearly none of the server have been used regularly as I've just been so so busy.

Laptops

HP Omen (6 core, 12 thread) - 8GB RAM - Used Rarely

PC Specialist (4 core, 8 thread) - 8GB RAM - The Wifes machine, used as a network drive mirror

Lenovo ThinkPad E480 (4 core, 8 thread) - 16GB RAM - Main Laptop

What I decided is, a lot of this server infrastructure has got to go, and to do that the tasks they do - even in frequently have to be picked up by something, and I decided that as I usually spend my time in my new dedicated office I may as well have as much of that working here in the room with me.

The immediate points were to take all the work of the two main machines, the E5-2620 dual socket server (so 24 threads) and my workstation (12 threads), that's 36 threads of work to contend with doling out.

But, I immediately thought about keeping costs low.  The E5 class of Xeons have come down in price and have 10 cores and 20 threads, two of those maybe the way I decide to go... Forearmed with 40 threads, it's a case of getting a dual socket motherboard for my workstation, and since I game on the machine too, perhaps the slower L versions of that class wouldn't cut it... But research will be had.

128GB of RAM or more, seeing as these processors are last-gen that means DDR3 and specifically server EEC DDR3, which is fairly cheap.  And of course I have a whole bunch already in the house.  Unfortunately I have 128GB in 4GB sticks, but it's enough to get me up and testing x79 motherboards from aliexpress.

With the stock of parts I have on hand, it's therefore a the task of recasing things, making them quiet and having them bearably in the office with me.... I've been enamoured with the Corsair Obsidian range of cases for a while... But even before the case, power... 

My E5 based server is a Supermicro, but the motherboard within is actually just an EATX board, so with a spare PSU I could power it up in a new case maybe... And that's where I've decided to start... My first purchase therefore has been a new PSU.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06ZZ3BYV7

This is platinum rated, that's highly highly efficient, it's all Japanese capacitors, it's workstation class and completely modular.

And you know what, it's only the third power supply I own, you may recall the Xmas Eve rush for a PC from a mate of mine, well I'm pretty sure that the problems there were the PSU in that machine... And I had no spare to offer, felt quite bad about that.  But now I will have spare, because my workstation will be shuffled down one notch into other devices.

The last focus I had on cases was cheapness...

The next one will be style & function.

Great Rack Mount Mistakes #6

A long time coming, here's another story from my days long past, this one takes me to my very first serious role in an IT department, I was however just the dogs body.  The company ran many old PC's (which I actually was around to see mostly be updated to nice Compaq Pentium III's) and they had a couple of high spec Silicon Graphics workstations in the design department.

The main manufacturing control and purchasing system, as well as payroll and a bunch of other services ran on a dual 386 based mini computer, which had a custom cut of ScoUnix and a bunch of bespoke C programs comprising the actual system stack, this was accessed by a whole host or Gandalf multiplexers combining the serial connections down from a hundred or so Wyse brand terminals (I wish I'd have nabbed one of those before I left).

Anyway, it was time for this back end stack to be updated, and so a pair of Compaq Proliant servers were brought in, these were dual Pentium III class with a dedicated storage unit and a large; and importantly heavy; UPS unit.

The problem?  The IT manager I worked for (Hi Dave) didn't get on at all well with the manager at the co-location this unit was to be installed in.  Therefore in a dual effort to maintain any vestige of control and avoid the guy he didn't like, my boss ordered all the equipment to be delivered to our office... In central Nottinghamshire.... Yet its final destination once configured was to be outside Peterlee in the North East, near Newcastle.

So after around a day of setting up the equipment and (as far as I recall) three days solid compiling time - yes it took that long - the system was ready to go.

However, no-one had kept the boxes, yes it was all out of the box spread on a floor and then hand hauled over to a fire-exit and precariously piled into the back of a Hyundai estate.

Yes, that's how tens of thousands upon thousands of pounds worth of top notch equipment (for 1998) made it's precarious way 120 miles, bouncing and jostling all the way.

At the time I never questioned this, I was a lowly minion, I would of course council against such a move ever again, the installation of the physical equipment should have been done at the remote site, and they definitely should have kept the boxes and packaging in full!

Healthier Lunch #1

I've been trying to eat more healthily at my desk... Here's the "healthier" option....

Oat So Simple?  More like Owt So Wall-Paper Paste.....

CMake rather than Mammoth makefile marathons

I'm having difficulty communicating with some folks about the beauty of cmake and using ccmake to leverage that beauty.

These are folks whom are either completely ignorant of what a makefile should look like, are happy to manage their own or at worst case are folks put off of makefiles by having inherited projects which have spiralled out of control with mammoth makefiles and a propensity to being so complex as to prevent any cost-effective entry grade for new developers to key into - i.e. they're too hard to learn, or obfuscated sufficiently to allow established developers to retain their positions of glory and power.

I don't subscribe to that ethos however, and believe that as a leader in development you should facilitate everyone to be being able to do everyone else's development role, be that starting a new project or continuing an old.

It perhaps comes from my being able to work alone and defining a role which others are then keyed into, I have been forced to allow entry to my work, to make the cost of someone else bootstrapping my work into their wetware (brain) as simple as possible.

Mammoth makefile marathons are not the way for me to do that, a CMakeLists.txt file, now that's a better proposition.  However, even here you have to take care, some folks are ignorant of the tools available, to leverage cmake in this way one might use this kind of command line...

This is daunting for a newbie, and even an experienced developer has to admit...

ccmake <PATH_TO_CMAKELISTS>

This is a much more succinct and easy to access way of getting into your CMake way of working, the cost of entry being so low as to actually make introducing new developers to Linux development, or just general CMake usage, trivial.

So where am I failing to communicate this?

Well, cmake, ccmake... The naming conventions of both are so close as to confuse people, they don't hear the second C in CCmake, or they think I'm talking about the C Programming language.  This is a lack of understanding on their part, people being people however, they don't want to admit they've no idea what you're talking about.

(As an aside, folks, if you want to be a good developer, a good person, please admit when you don't know something, it causes so much less issues in at development scrum time if you are handed work, and you simply state "I know nothing about that".  Someone else can be assigned the role, or better still, you can get training and schedule the work more effectively!)

My solution to this difficulty therefore?

Rename the programs, I've created two symbolic links in /usr/bin....

sudo ln -s /usr/local/cmake/bin/ccmake /usr/bin/makefile_prep_gui

sudo ln -s /usr/local/cmake/bin/cmake /usr/bin/makefile_prep_cmd

I've essentially bamboozled the communication factor by giving cmake the working name "makefile_prep", this means that those opposed to ceasing direct use of makefiles still feel empowered, but are subtly diverted to using an automated tool.

Immediately questions and opposite to changing the status quo has ceased, and folks are talking about using the new "makefile_prep" tools.... How clean they are, how nice the builds look, how they integrate with CLion easily, and "the output from my makefile_prep looks exactly like the build going on inside the IDE (CLion)"... Little do they realise they're both cmake!

Oiling the cogs of resistance to change, this is where I'm living at present... Its not an easy task, but sometimes it's rewarding.... Now to do the same in the day-office.

Life Tip...

Top tip... If you run a business... And print people invoices... Learn to count... Tip ends.

This story is to be continued....

My Moroccan Work Week

Many moons ago, when my then boss knew I was the dogs danglies, I used to get sent to work at offices all over the world, and today I want to tell you the story of one of those journeys to and from the "office".

I live and work out of Nottingham, and this one time I had to go work out of Casablanca for a week.  Now, for those of you not aware of this, I do not mean I went to work in a black and white film... Casablanca is a real place, a city in fact, in the North African country of Morocco, exotic... Maybe, if you like that thing.

Anyway, I was in my early twenties and sent on this trip, I spoke broken GCSE French, and was handed a few thousand French Francs (yes it's that long ago, France still had a proper currency, with a history and everything).

The journey began at an indecently early hour, a driver to take myself and a pair of cow-orkers to Heathrow, no big deal, though the driver had a tin of sweets which he was really really over proud of; he was also sceptical I wasn't the son of the two other passengers, as I was so young.

Arriving Heathrow no big deal... The flight fine and dandy... I saw sail boats in the Straits of Gibraltar...

When we landed and were in arrivals we had our bags back, and there was a driver for me, or for my then company... Not the co-workers whom were a different company - merger in progress as it were - so we all went to get in this one Merc... Now, I immediately went to the wrong side of the car, going to the British passenger side, which was the Moroccan drivers side; this baffled the driver.

But getting into the car we immediately found there were no seatbelts... the clip was engaged, but there was no strap.  Asking the driver he said, "no-one uses seat belts here, so we cut them and put the pegs in to stop the car beeping as we drive".

He then proceeded to drive like a loon, on pitch black desert roads from King Mohammed V airport into the heart of Casablanca.  By the time we arrived at the hotel we were ready for a bit of food, maybe a drink, the bar looked at my french francs like I was mad... "Charge it to my room"... silence.

This was meant to be a dry country remember, but the bar was there serving alcohol... Anyway, bed early, a morning start... My suit had just about survived being packed into a back-pack, but someone had taken the batteries out of the side pocket, which had my alarm clock... Sorting out a wake-up call was a bit of a nightmare, but I got there in the end.

Fun fact, order English Breakfast tea, they bring it to you with hot milk... URGH.  I sent it back first time around... I am such a noob.

The fun began mid-week, when I had an afternoon early ending, and got to spend sometime at the hotel, the Hyatt near the Port.  I went for a walk about, and was soon approached by a pair of Moroccan lads who invited me to "come to the bazaar, great café, show you hasheesh"... I declined their kind offer, seeing it as a mix of either illegal, or simply an attempt at kidnap.  he surprised me however by pulling his wallet from his pocket and showing me he'd spent time in Manchester...

The hard week of work ended, and I found myself back at the airport...

But there was no plane... Royal Air Moroc had no plane... There was myself, the two co-workers back from their site, and then one German chap, waiting for a whole 737... Royal Air Moroc however hadn't planned for this.

An hour late they "borrowed" a plane from Air Egypt, and the four of us boarded, this empty plane.

I have no idea why, but the staff insisted that the three of us sit together on one row... a little cramped, whilst the German chap was sat up front waving back at us all alone for the duration.  They really didn't want us to move seats.

The pilot (or it may have been the co-pilot) came back after take off and introduced himself to us, ah the days before they locked the flight deck.  I remember he had a white cotton scarf around his neck, my memory tells me this was on a wire so it stood up like biggles... But I may just be mentally elaborating...

The meal came around about this time... The offer was "Chicken or Goat", seriously... I had the goat, it was nice.

They then wanted to sell us drinks, and I panicked... Trying to ask for a "1664".. In French... instead of just asking for "un bier"... This brain fart haunts me to this day, but I was young, I was an idiot, I wanted to speak French, to a very pretty Moroccan Air hostess... Or maybe she was Egyptian....

I remember that the air hostesses didn't cover their air, a mark perhaps of days gone by?  I don't know, maybe someone can tell me.

The trip was rounded off when I got back to the chauffeur car, to come back from London to Nottingham, and he looked at me and said... "You're not on my list to come back with me".

My co-workers didn't say "lets take him", or anything as I had done in Morocco with the car sent under my company name, oh no, they just got in the car, with me standing there looking (I'm sure) a little green he added "but I'll take you as well".

We set off back to Nottingham.

Other images of Casablanca I remember are of going through the bazaar and a chat in a white tiles store asking me "You want my daughter, she cook, she clean, very clean girl".  She was 12, he didn't mean sexually either, he wanted her to be my house keeper and my take her to the UK.  I politely declined.

I was also accosted from the street, whilst I walked in the Hotel Perimeter garden, a voice from a man carrying a battered looking AK47 and a dead cockerel shouted to me... "Are you American?"  With a distinct twang on the last word.

"No I'm English" I replied...

"English?"  He beamed with his one remaining tooth "I support Manchester United".  I wondered if he was the granddad of the lad who'd accosted me mid-week, I really did.

Good times, quite sad that I sit in an office all the time now.

Tech Office: Talking Dress Code

Lets put this clearly, I don't believe in a set dress code (as in defining what anyone can wear) in technology, I've seen anecdotal evidence of the history of IBM where they insist on suits and sock garters and alsorts of things, I've seen companies demand you wear a suit - indeed I used to work in Formalwear production and had to wear a suit - I like suits, however, I don't believe they have a place in the everyday development office.

If you're seeing customers, if you're "forward facing" then sure, dress up.  But smart casual is enough for me, what is "Smart Casual"?

Jeans, sure.  Shirt, sure.  T-Shirt if it's plain, sure.  What's not... Well, how about a 30 year old sagging woolen jumper?  Please no, just no.

What about a bright orange flair neck shirt which has its top three buttons missing and is worn by a hairy chested 1970's throw back?  Please god no.

What about shoes?  Well, I wear a nice pair of Rockport leather shoes, they're functional, comfortable, ageing but decent looking... Trainers, I have no objection to trainers, sandles... No... No sandles.

Shorts?... Please No, just no.

Combat trousers, I'm find with them, so long as you're not putting ammo in the pockets, oh and they're a plain colour.

Then you come to the more sticky points, its kind of the dress code, and sure medical considerations aside, how do you smell?  I've worked with people, not directly in my team, who stink.  Bodily, as though they don't wash, but also as though they've been dipped in something... Chemicals, paints, cigarettes, bad breath, BO... It's just not acceptable, it's not polite, when you're working elbow to elbow or if you smell so bad people give you a wide birth, or close their mouth as they come past your desk, beware you will be asked to spray.

That said, what do you spray?  Please god, nothing totally stinking...

Software Development : Failed to get Agile

I've just been party to a conversation about a project elsewhere in my work place, my team is not involved, I was observing passively (alright, alright, I was ear-wigging).

The conversation was quite heated, one member of staff was adamant things were fine, whilst another was adamant they were inadequate.  The two of them were at complete logger heads. The driver of the conversation ran like this:

"We're not really designing software, we're asking everyone's opinion, writing it all down and only picking the things we really need to do"

As an agile developer this is essentially how I run my team, we write every possible item down, everything and I weight them, schedule them and during out sprint hand-overs we reorg whom is going to tackle diffing parts of the system to share the experience and share different things.

This chap however, was incredulous... He expressed "WRITING EVERYTHING DOWN" as a bad thing... He only wanted to do the things he felt fit, he wanted to sit down and look at the specification, produce an analysis and ONLY do what he suggested.

This would have made perfect sense to be towards the end of my academic study of software development; before the reality struck home in the work place, and I was flabbergasted to hear this chap simply working twenty something years in the past.

I mean, he's old... This company is old... But, not that old surely?

I literally caught myself tipping my head to one side as if trying to pour those words, and the way they were said, back out of my brain.

He didn't stop there though, he sat and without knowing it essentially dismissed as absurd the complete concept of Agile development; at least Agile as I use it...

"You'd be constantly juggling which task to do next, swapping people on and off tasks.... What would you do?  Meet daily, what would be the point?"

I'm not sure whether this was genuine inflexibility or purposefully derailing the effort to adopt agile beyond the scope of my own team, whichever it was, it sounded and felt extremely awkward.

It makes me wonder quite if anyone outside my team actually uses Agile processes around here...