Author: mark

The story of the startup, and how I ended up in my “dream job”……. 9 years ago, on New Years eve, I emailed my boss “It’s been great, but I can’t work here anymore. I quit”. It was greeted with a “I understand, but there must be something I can do?”. […]

Why Teachers shouldn’t be expected to teach programming…… It was in the news recently that teachers are under ever increasing pressure to teach “coding” to children, from as young as the age of 5. Now don’t get me wrong. I think this, in theory, is incredible, and valuable. There is […]

Imposter Syndrome — The New Job I recently read a blog post by Max Woolf, a fellow ex BoxUK employee, about something called “Imposter Syndrome”, and, similar to my posts about Burn Out, it’s something I can relate to, and felt it right to join in on the subject and hope to rid […]

Burnout — Looking back….. This post was originally written back in 2010….I’ve been a developer for 8+ years now, and this still stands…..although it has been superseded by this post….. but nothing has changed…… I’ve been a web developer for over 3 years now (professionally), and a lot longer if you go back […]

PLEASE FOLLOW ME!! Please, I need to get my follower count up. MAKE ME FEEL POPULAR. I’m seeing more and more of this on Twitter. What makes it worse, is that it’s coming from “Professional” “SEO” “Experts”. Yes, they do all require quotes, because I’m not referring to them by those […]

Agile — You’re probably doing it wrong. I’ve worked in a few “Agile” environments — but can safely say that I think only one of these had Agile “right” for their needs. I recently read a blog post about Agile being done wrong, and it made me think, which is never a good thing. There […]

Do you love your job? (Article written May 1st 2013) We spend (on average) 11.5 years of our life at work. That is nearly 100, 000 hours in the office. And that, is a lot of time. I’m very lucky with my career, in that, my job is my hobby. If […]

When “testing” goes wrong….Breaking News, Breaking Rules Today, something very strange popped up on my phone, at 10:22am. I’m used to the lovely BBC Breaking news music going off every now and again, so I when I hear it, I have to check and see what’s going on. However, the message […]

48 hours offline — Could you manage? Do you remember a time when we didn’t have the internet? Days where we used to have to phone our friends to arrange to go up the park for a kick about, or actually communicate with each other verbally when standing in the pub pondering the […]