anthony galvin
It’s a surprisingly warm summers day. We’ve been coming to Mull for more than a decade, but we’ve never had weather like this. It’s a flat calm on Calgary beach and the sun is beating down. The beaches of the west coast of Scotland often look like the Caribbean, but for once they even feel like it!
It’s pretty busy, for the Inner Hebrides, which means not that busy at all. Once I push out from the beach the hubbub slips away and I’m floating over the seaweed below, looking out for fish beneath the gentle waves lazily rolling in. I stand up from my kneeling position. After a few minor wobbles I’m ready to scoot round the northern side of the bay, up towards the old pier. There’s a couple having a picnic who are slightly surprised by my “hello”!
The bottom drops away from this point, and I get a moment of vertigo as I suddenly feel like I’m a long way from shore. I spin the board round and head back in a little before pushing across the bay towards the far side, past a yacht anchored a little way off shore.
As I head back in, the effort starts to hit me, there’s more current here than you might think, and on another day it would be a much riskier enterprise, but with a few minutes of long pulls on the paddle I’m back in the shallows where the girls coming splashing in to meet me.
23/12/2021 permalink
No 10 plans to lower salary level at which graduates start repaying loans
Government believes too many students are racking up debts studying “soft” 3-year university courses in arts and social sciences, and is looking to funnel more 18 year olds towards technical training that is cheaper and will pay a faster economic dividend.
It probably was “soft” compared to some degrees, but I learnt an awful lot of “soft” skills that have proved way more important than the technical skills that I learned on the job.
27/09/2021 permalink
MKGeek Night, my local tech meet-up.
My local tech meet-up, nice breadth of topics and a good group of participants - hosted at the always excellent MK Gallery.
20/09/2021 permalink
Home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies aged 81
My friend Chris, from over the road, had a ZX Spectrum. It was an absolute marvel and embedded somewhere in my brain the idea that computers were something you could use to create things.
16/09/2021 permalink
How R/GA Is Bringing AI to Brand Naming
As always with agency hype around AI, the article reads better if you ignore the references to AI and just assume this is good old Machine Learning (and quite possible Linear Regression) - but if anyone can pull this off it's probably R/GA. Great to see what Rob and the team have been working on.
16/09/2021 permalink
The Mentorship Diamond
The idea that one person, your manager, is going to be the oracle on your career is a bit optimistic. Mentees all round!
16/09/2021 permalink
The Case for ‘Developer Experience’
If you're an engineering lead business and you make vendor and toolset choices that don't take account of the impact on the team it's not likely to go so well.
16/09/2021 permalink
Optimizing a homepage image from 10MB to 78KB
Great deep dive into image optimisation - and a reminder that really delivering on web performance often takes expertise and diligence that's hard to deliver at scale.
15/09/2021 permalink
The best way to validate an email is probably to send one
Feels like every few months I end up sharing this link. Email has been around for 40 years and it's still catching us out.
15/09/2021 permalink
How do you prefer to contact customer services?
Over 50+ prefer phone, under 50s prefer live chat.
14/09/2021 permalink