David Edgar's website

Wednesday, 06 March 2024

πŸ”– How To Be A Good Listener

Advice on how to listen to people. I don't want to say "effectively" because that sounds reductive and transactional. But how to listen with purpose to actually make connections with people . In summary:

  1. Don't negate what they are saying
  2. Don't make it about yourself
  3. Don't walk down, particularly to children
  4. Ask questions

Some of what she says I summarised a bit; a couple of the points were basically "Don't make it abut yourself" but from different angles.

πŸ”– Behind F1's Velvet Curtain

Kate Wagner, author of McMansion Hell, is sent by Road and Track, to do a piece on F1. Wagner has positive impressions of a driver, Lewis Hamilton, neutral impressions of the sport, and negative views of the rich, high-status people in the same audience areas as herself. Road and Track actually took the article off their website an hour after publishing it and at time of bookmarking there is very little context as for why. The explanations given by the editor in chief don't make much sense even to me, a non-media person.

Saturday, 02 March 2024

Every time I encounter a seppo payment system that refuses to accept my four digit postcode I stop to wonder if banks just accept 90210 as a wildcard.

Friday, 23 February 2024

πŸ”– Preserved Figs

Monday, 12 February 2024

Nothing highlights the pure theatre of ISO 27001 quite like correctly answering all of the questions in the mandatory security training but being chased personally eight months later for not watching each second of the videos from which one was supposed to discover the answers to the questions.

Sunday, 11 February 2024

I somehow seem to each year pick a side I kinda want to see win in the Super Bowl despite normally believing it is a very silly, boring sport.

NGL this year it’s the team whose victory will piss off the most Americans.

πŸ”– A unified theory of fucks

I had a similar theory, about not caring about things more than the people who are intrinsically motivated to care. Mandy's make so much more sense.

Friday, 09 February 2024

πŸ”– Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, or, “Looking for the Mouse”

Clay Shirky (inorite) yammers on about finding ways to divert surplus brain cycles into something he considers productive. Feels like there is some morsels in it despite...you know...Shirky.

πŸ”– Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole

Friday, 02 February 2024

πŸ”– Balancing Engineering Cultures: Debate Everything vs. Just Tell Me What To Build

πŸ”– How to build a small solar power system

Wednesday, 17 January 2024

I’m looking forward to receiving Atlassian’s study a dozen times today from people mad about the mandatory two days in the office.

Sunday, 07 January 2024

They know, right...barbers? They can tell while cutting your hair whether you spend much time on it? It was when the guy pulled out the third different brush while frying my scalp underneath the blow dryer that I felt like saying to him "You know this is the only time for the next three months my hair is going to see any instrument other than my fingers, right?"

Saturday, 06 January 2024

πŸ”– How to build a small solar power system

Friday, 03 November 2023

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/oct/31/michelangelo-secret-sketches-under-church-in-florence-open-to-public

Michelangelo hid from the Medicis.

In a tiny room beneath...... the Medici Chapels.

I was kind of disappointed to find it wasn't already noted in the Real Life examples of the Right Under Their Noses trope, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RightUnderTheirNoses

Friday, 29 September 2023

πŸ”– Croc - File Transfer Tool

croc is a tool that allows any two computers to simply and securely transfer files and folders.

Tuesday, 05 September 2023

πŸ”– Measuring Developer Productivity Part 2

Part 2 of a response to the McKinsey developer productivity idea

πŸ”– Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey Part 1

I predict this article being very useful to me by the end of the year in order to fend off the McKinsey thing being applied to me

Saturday, 26 August 2023

πŸ”– Finish Your Projects

I pick stupid large projects with no scope and no idea what I am trying to achieve and then starting smaller yak-shaving projects as I go and never really finish any of them :-)

Sunday, 20 August 2023

πŸ”– So something, so we can change it

An argument for making decisions, regardless of your certainty about them being the right one. You can always change it afterwards if it wasn't right. Makes a note of decisions that are hard or impossible to change vs decisions that are easy to change.

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