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  One long-term benefit of the pandemic is the increased likelihood of hand-sanitiser availability in different locations, such as company sites. This is particularly useful when there is a need to clean a whiteboard because a given company keeps both whiteboard markers and permanent markers in the same room 🤦‍♂️

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  My latest #FlashFiction is up on 365tomorrows: Rules and Guidance for Astronaut Welfare on Small Moons https://365tomorrows.com/2026/07/28/rules-and-guidance-for-astronaut-welfare-on-small-moons/

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  I'm speaking at KanDDDinsky 2026 in Berlin this October. 14-15 October, Park Inn at Alexanderplatz. Early-bird tickets are 800 EUR until this Friday, 31 July. After that they go up to 950 EUR. https://kandddinsky.com/ #KanDDDinsky #DDD #DomainDrivenDesign

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  Pro tip: when presenting airport names by city in a dropdown list, order them alphabetically by the city name shown rather than the 3-letter IATA code 🤦‍♂️

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  An 'eggcorn' is an incorrect but oddly appropriate substitution for a word (see my WordFriday definition: https://www.facebook.com/WordFriday/posts/596606817093946). Over the years I've encountered some initialisms in software that have been expanded in a way that might be considered eggcornish, e.g., UML as Universal Markup Language (certainly reflecting the aspirations of some of overly vocal advocates) and BDD as Business-Driven Development. What eggcorns or similar have you com...

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  Your not-frequent-enough reminder: English is not a programming language.

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  Either customer support chatbots are a complete waste of time or I have just been very unlucky over the last few years. I have never had a useful interaction or resolution from one (except to pass me to a human being, and that normally takes quite some effort). In terms of organisational hostility, they seem even worse than dial-up menu systems. My experience has left me with the perception that they are complete garbage. Has anyone had consistently (or any) positive experiences?

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  Running an architecture workshop today. I open it with the following quote from Brian Foote and Joe Yoder's classic Big Ball of Mud paper: If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.

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  "In researching what separates change successes from failures at organizations [...] leaders designing change were consistently more confident about employee progress on change than the employees’ actual behavior or stated experience supported. They trusted their read on the room. The data, when they gathered it, told a different story. The wider the gap, the more likely the change failure." https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/creating-successful-change/202606/why-its-so-hard-to-k...

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  A question (or hope) that keeps popping up is whether or not LLM prompts will replace code, not simply generate it. The short answer is no. A slightly longer answer is that prompts will only ever replace code by having LLMs not behave like LLMs.

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  I'm speaking at the OOP conference in Munich in February. Get a 15% discount with voucher code OOP25_Henney.

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  Much Ado About Nothing at Umbraco Spark Join me on 20th March in Bristol where I will be giving a short talk on nothing. Literally. Ever since zero became something for nothing, you'd think we'd solved nothing. Appropriately representing the absence of something in code or data, however, takes more than zero effort. https://www.tickettailor.com/events/umbukfdn/1896581

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  Last weekend on my Instagram: The Peak District https://instagram.com/kevlin.henney

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  Pro tip: if your company's name and your mobile app name are unrelated, ask yourself why you're developing a product that you don't want people to remember or find easily

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  Vulture Culture by Teedy Deigh, in the latest edition of @ACCU Overload "Remember all the fuss around the metaverse? Trying to build on an SF trope from the 1980s while pretending that the 1990s and three decades of the Web hadn't happened might not be a solid business plan." https://accu.org/journals/overload/34/192/deigh/

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  Vulture Culture by Teedy Deigh "Did I make it big in cloud computing? No... no, I did not. We were all told having the right cloud strategy was important. Hiring a bunch of meteorologists, however, turned out not to be that strategy. That one was on me. But at least it wasn't my start-up." @ACCU Overload https://accu.org/journals/overload/34/192/deigh/

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  Yesterday's WordFriday: noctcaelador https://www.tumblr.com/wordfriday/809045202349309952/noctcaelador-noun https://www.facebook.com/WordFriday/posts/pfbid02NuwcWshh12v2bFQmeoq55wizer88cmAm8Z7tJzSwRQ9bdWf7n6rFt1QVQEB7QwZUl

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  WordFriday: mathwashing Conveying a false sense of objectivity and neutrality through the use of mathematical terminology, statistics, data, algorithms, etc. https://www.tumblr.com/wordfriday/806540858037059584/mathwashing-noun https://www.facebook.com/WordFriday/posts/pfbid02E9mjEAFdEhEWUDiVdrctDg2zWsLiC6DPPcW5hyTmxuXRPLWZcEeuQzbYaf4vJPLpl

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  As a perennial and unrepentant em dash user — if em dashes make you think AI output, let me introduce myself: I'm part of the input — I thoroughly enjoyed this defence of the em dash by Jessica Clark: https://www.mamamia.com.au/how-to-use-em-dash/

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  The reading paradox: the books you don't want to end do; the books you wish would end seem never to

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  There is an art (and a science) to numerical precision that seems lost in software, writing and conversation. The trick to appropriate precision is understanding accuracy. This all falls under the banner of numeracy. For example, I just received a confirmation of a cinema booking that gave the time of the film in HH:MM:SS format. The site lists programme times in HH:MM. They normally start trailers within a few minutes of the advertised time. To list seconds is an innumerate and false promise.

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  A lot of security is based on trust. Trust relies on competence. The security theatre I get from a lot of sites and apps, sometimes elaborated through MFA, does not inspire such trust. That device you tell me is unrecognised? It's the one I've used to access the app every day for at least the last year. If you want to convince me your app is secure, start with competence. Poorly engineered products don't do that. KPI-driven product staff don't do that.

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  Yesterday's WordFriday: antiprime https://www.tumblr.com/wordfriday/807188713774989312/antiprime-noun https://www.facebook.com/WordFriday/posts/pfbid02MRmFJPJh1cXKLREVa9be94BTovicL1ehTLSyPC7V3bEvW4ve1VWpQFAJLWAH41Kml

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  Yesterday's WordFriday: mathwashing https://www.tumblr.com/wordfriday/806540858037059584/mathwashing-noun https://www.facebook.com/WordFriday/posts/pfbid02E9mjEAFdEhEWUDiVdrctDg2zWsLiC6DPPcW5hyTmxuXRPLWZcEeuQzbYaf4vJPLpl