Everyone wants a blog but no-one wants to volunteer to write for it. Here's how to practice the art of gentle encouragement.

The tech industry is backing itself into the corner of a massive skills shortage, in part by not helping junior engineers enter the industry. Here's how you can.

Company culture, your manager and society can all create the conditions for burnout and exhaustion. But as your manager the most important thing you can do for me is look after yourself.

I go to the Grace Hopper Celebration for the first time.

After being laid off as a team we thought we'd try looking for work together. Here's how we did it and what happened.

Coding tests are a big hurdle for many developers. Here's some tips to help you get to the next stage.

What kind of pair programmer are you?

I thought about starting with a quote from the Dalai Lama about being wisely selfish but then I thought, no, that’s immediately going to alienate a bunch of people who really might need to read this. So instead I’ll ask a couple of questions - how are your software development efforts going? Getting projects completed on time and near budget? Customers satisfied? Money rolling in? Developers sticking around? If the answers include no then I’d ask you to take the time to read this and consider if maybe the problem isn’t with the industry/sales team/techies/exchange rate/economy but instead with how happy your developers are. Here’s why it’s an idea worth pondering:

At home I have a chocolate tin. It accommodates my obsession for buying every chocolate bar I see that I have yet to taste. I have reasonably strong preferences and usually go for dark chocolate but will buy milk or white, assuming it has been made with cocoa butter and not some random vegetable fat. I don’t actually eat that much chocolate, maybe a square or two a day, unless we are talking about Whittaker’s Dark Almond in which case I’ll go a whole row of that. However eating is the least fun thing about chocolate for me. I love telling stories about all the different chocolates and vicariously sharing the pleasure other people get from it.