The Curious Engineer

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Life Beyond Fife

lifebeyondfife.com

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

Engineering management / careersSoftware / engineering practiceEssays / personal

’15’20’25
Posts
119 from 18 Jul 2011 to 11 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (6 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://lifebeyondfife.com/rss.xml

2026 5

  1. Aligning Product and Engineering
  2. Sabbatical II
  3. The Three Layers of Software Engineering
  4. Speedrunning A Failed Business
  5. Software Engineer Dystopia or Hegemony

2025 4

  1. I have a book for that
  2. Defend your codebase against AI comments
  3. The Slow Path to Everything
  4. The Deployment Constraint: Speed, Safety, and Automation

2024 3

  1. Why 5 Whys isn't enough
  2. Convincing or Instructing
  3. Managing Expectations

2023 1

  1. Stop saying Tech Debt

2022 1

  1. What are your engineering culture values?

2021 3

  1. Hiring advice for bootcamp graduates
  2. Manager README 2021
  3. Corporate values as memes

2020 21

  1. Ready to start
  2. Plateau
  3. Move outwards from the core
  4. Warming up and down
  5. Ratio of lifts
  6. Basis of strength
  7. Technique is key
  8. Compound lifts
  9. Why getting strong is hard – Part III
  10. Why getting strong is hard – Part II
  11. Why getting strong is hard – Part I
  12. Food
  13. Get strong first
  14. Preparation for training
  15. Increase calories
  16. The body as an engine
  17. Fitness types
  18. Systems not goals
  19. Body image
  20. Motivation
  21. Stress

2019 6

  1. Training
  2. Measure the right thing
  3. Question everything
  4. Sacrifice and Results
  5. Change for life
  6. Snake oil selling better than ever

2018 1

  1. Manager README

2017 3

  1. Are you joining a good engineering team?
  2. How much coding should a manager do?
  3. Are you happy?

2016 8

  1. How I became a data scientist
  2. Insurance against LeftPad level events
  3. Breaking into the opinionated, disjointed world of web development
  4. Caveats
  5. Conclusion
  6. The inner cycle
  7. The middle cycle
  8. The outer cycle

2015 15

  1. Setup: the origin repo
  2. Cycles: the introduction
  3. Never, EVER, push to master
  4. branch off, commit, and merge back
  5. review with status, diff and log
  6. add and remove (rm), checkout and reset
  7. checkout this branch
  8. push and pull
  9. init, clone and origin
  10. End to Big Bang commits
  11. Backup as often as you like
  12. Work on multiple changes concurrently
  13. Power of the server in your client
  14. For those not yet using git
  15. Yo dawg, I heard you like functions

2014 7

  1. A git workflow for beginners
  2. Fantasy Football Team Selector 2014-15
  3. Converting XML to JSON
  4. Before you learn to program
  5. Death By A Million Cuts
  6. Confusing Christmas with Halloween
  7. How Not To Do a Hackathon

2013 13

  1. The 10 Types of People
  2. Counting Like A Computer
  3. Helping a stranger (and why you should understand NP-complete)
  4. Computer Science in Plain English
  5. Fantasy Football Team Selector 2013-14
  6. The Future of Education
  7. Expert or Generalist?
  8. Curiosity Killed The Productivity
  9. Designing your wedding ring with 13 year old code
  10. XML Serialisation
  11. Idea A Day
  12. The Difference Between Mean and Median
  13. From Idea to Launch: A Website Dissection

2012 14

  1. What's New? Music
  2. Becoming a Web Developer
  3. Failure and Unfair Comparisons
  4. Fantasy Football League Team Selector 2012-13
  5. One year in...
  6. Modular WPF Interfaces
  7. Barrier To Entry
  8. How I lost, and regained, my coding mojo
  9. New Music - Part I
  10. /Sabbatical
  11. A Restful Weekend
  12. Beauty in Mathematics
  13. Banking Isn't Evil
  14. What University Challenge considers Computer Science

2011 14

  1. Developing in Remote Teams
  2. max(e^pi, pi^e)?
  3. Functional Programming For Object Oriented Programmers
  4. Real Life and Video Games
  5. Caveats on actually using async and await
  6. Simple WPF IronPython Application
  7. Environmentalism and Amdahl's Law for the Masses
  8. D-Lighted: The lightweight, multi-platform database tool
  9. Carpenters make tables and chairs, not hammers and saws
  10. Addenda for Adopting Agile Development
  11. Fantasy Football Team Selector
  12. OLE Automation Date Converter
  13. Developing in the Brown Field
  14. Sabbatical