Good night, everyone. It feels like our so-called "leaders" have all but abandoned us, but we still have each other. I didn't know what else to do, so I made a little painting. Stay safe out there 💛

Weird philosophical @kevlin.bsky.social with my phone's todo app. Due dates for repeating tasks have stayed the same but their reminders have moved forward one day. All my important "Today don't forget to..." have been magically transformed into "Yesterday did you remember to...?"

I $object to this template @kevlin.bsky.social

My Christmas wish for any ai vibe coders out there is for you to be visited in the night by @JasonGorman.bsky.social, GeePaw Hill and @EmilyBache.com. Don't worry, they aren't ghosts, they are nice, you'll really like them. Listen to them.

You will be visited by three spirits.

Every year we make a free-to-download-and-print-off-yourself colouring-in Advent Calendar. This year’s heavily features Bigfoots. Please share! Download it for free here… www.worldofmoose.com/pages/2025-b...

The very last #AgileNorthEast tonight, closing with a round of lightning talks. Thanks to Jon, Paul and Stephen for the hard work of organising and facilitating over the years #agile

Occasionally on my work laptop a black box pops up with the words "Windows Powershell", and I think "Yes, it probably does."

Van Halen wouldn't have fallen for it! "I showed GPT-5’s responses to a bunch of people, and more than half didn’t notice the 'Brown M&Ms'. This, I suspect, is what really explains why people perceive the effectiveness of LLMs so differently" codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/10/03/l...

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

TDD should be more widely used - I recently recorded a conversation with @davefarley77.bsky.social and as ever we found lots to discuss about TDD. We don't always completely agree either: youtu.be/6yb7jKpxTjM?...

Indiana was the name of the dog not the Dr :) Surely they should cycle through Fluffy, Spike, Killer, Rex, Lassie, Fido, Mr Chuckles …

Today is the anniversary of Alan Turing’s suicide, in 1954. Turing was the father of modern computing. His codebreaking helped the Allies to win WWII. Arrested for being gay, he chose chemical castration over a prison sentence. He lost his security clearance, as all homosexuals were deemed a risk.

How can an *Equality* and *Human Rights* Commissioner say with a straight face trans people have to accept reduced rights, whether perceived or actual?

Happy Glorious 25th of May! GNU Sir Terry Pratchett. How do they rise up? #Glorious25th #Discworld #TruthJusticeFreedomReasonablyPricedLove #Speakhisname

how do they rise up happy glorious twenty-fifth of May, let us all wear the lilac in memory of Sir Terry

The future is already here! 'Agentic' means making the suffix of your bash script '.ai' instead of '.sh', and piping through a non-deterministic LLM rather than sed. You've got this.

New vibe coding setup

I'm running my Keeping It Simple masterclass a few times at conferences over the next few months: Codecamp, Bucharest, 6-7 May codecamp.ro/masterclasse... SDD, London, 12 May sddconf.com/agenda GOTO Copenhagen, 30 September gotocph.com/2025/masterc...

Unexpected (aren't they all?) @kevlin.bsky.social while trying to submit a meter reading

Complexity Theory predicts that organisational outcomes are more likely to be determined not by individuals, but by the interactions between individuals & groups of individuals. Any approach to improving effectiveness that focuses on individual performance is likely to fail.

Debugging an ancient odbc problem today with a younger dev and describing the windows .ini file format feels like teaching ancient Mesopotamian languages to The Jetsons

The great Aimee Mann and also me and also a full band presenting the STEELIEST of Dans

I keep getting the spooky feeling that the generative AI is testing us more than we are testing it

Fantastic day as usual @dddnorth.bsky.social 2025. #dddNorth

Discworld QOTD, from Guards! Guards!

Had my talk “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” selected for @dddnorth.bsky.social in February!

Registration now open for @DDDNorth 2025! The agenda has been published (just one or two slots left to fill... t.co/8qrDeR8IxK

Writers, musicians, actors & other creators strongly oppose upending copyright law to favour AI companies, as suggested in the UK's AI Opportunities Action Plan. As Kate Mosse says, seeking economic growth "cannot be on the basis of theft of our work". www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Just submitted two talk ideas for the next DDD North 2025 coming up in February - one on evolutionary design and one on getting unstuck in problem solving and debugging. 
www.dddnorth.co.uk

“We create quick and dirty solutions…” “Actually … we compensate for the lack of speed with extra dirtiness”

“A man, woman, boy, girl and a dog walk into a talent agent’s office…”

Got visited by only two ghosts last night because I’m not doing too badly but there’s definitely stuff I still need to work on. My personal growth goal forChristmas 2025 is to get just the pointy dude

New Christmas Movie theory: the prequel to John Mclane in “Die Hard” from 1988 is Kevin McAllister from 1990’s “Home Alone”. Mystery still surrounds why he changes his name after moving from Chicago to New York

#HugOps for the Morrisons IT folk and the system that can’t do anything like the basics it used to yesterday

@xlontrax.bsky.social I had a funny feeling you would be here :)

Yay! Need to come up with a suitably click-batey subject

Introducing a new person to “Rolling Rocks Downhill” by @clarkeching.com with my last physical copy

Don’t know why I did it, but I’ve got a feeling @woodyzuill.bsky.social is going to be pretty proud of me :)

@sayedha.bsky.social I have recently seen some c# code in a standalone utility that instantiates an msbuild task (fills in properties) and calls execute(). This feels like a bad idea and I’m sure I saw a specific warning about this back in the day but can’t find it now. Is it awesome or not so much?

SInce it's almost snow time here, a micro:bit snowglobe #microbit

Best use story I have ever seen: “As a tester I want to make sure that there are no defects in the program” #agile

People in (software) teams are not equal. This often leads to uncomfortable conversations during the tech leader training sessions I run, including the last one with Evelyn. It’s common for clients or participants to say, “But everyone in the team is equal.” A thread....