Over the years, I’ve spent quite some time in Britain and there are many things that fascinate me about it.
The first is that so many people that I meet with, particularly in England, have never seen much of the country, even though it’s not very big. They just don’t travel around to look at things. Even less have been to Ireland, even though it’s basically next door.
2025-04-27
I remember that back when Microsoft introduced the ribbon for the menu in Microsoft Excel, I was at a product group session where they explained why they did it. They told us that when they summarized all the requests from users for features to add to Excel, there was something amazing:
Almost every feature was already there
So, what they had was a discoverability issue, not a feature gap.
What prompted me to write this opinion today, is that I see exactly the same sort of issue in my data-related work. People are unaware of what their existing tooling and software can do, and wish features would be added, yet those features are already there.
2025-04-21
I see software houses all the time that are worried about why users find their software hard to use. Or at least harder than they thought they would find it.
One thing that I see worrying users time and again, is applications that discourage you for discovering how they work. Users are afraid to click on options that they haven’t used before, because they’re worried that something will happen that they can’t undo.
2025-04-14
I’ve had many tools create extra long file names, by the time you include the path. If you try to delete this using the DEL command in Windows, you’ll see an error.
The system cannot find the path specified
In particular, I’ve seen this with Visual Studio, and when I’ve used Git to clone repositories into folders.
If you run into this, the easiest way to deal with it is to:
2025-04-02
If ever there was a blog post that I didn’t ever expect to be writing it’s this one.
For such a long time, Notepad has been such a simple and stable application. That no longer seems to be the case.
Recently I had a situation where Notepad just didn’t work properly. I saw these things:
It was all rather frustrating.
2025-01-17
One of the events that I try to take part in each year is the Hack Summit. I’ve always enjoyed it.
The next edition of the The Hack Summit is on October 17th online and October 18th in Warsaw at Stadion PGE Narodowy. It’s a conference fully dedicated to cybersecurity.
I so wish I could have been there, but unfortunately, that’s not possible for me this year. The organizers describe it as having “a diverse and rich agenda, featuring more than 15 thematic tracks, over 150 presentations, networking opportunities, an afterparty, and much more….”.
2024-09-20
On July 27th 1993, Microsoft released Windows NT, the forerunner to the versions of Windows we use today, particularly the server versions.
If you’re old enough, one thing you’d remember about this event is how signficant it was. At the time, if you wanted a server-based operating system on a PC, you didn’t have that many choices. We were predominantly using variants of Unix, most commonly Xenix.
Importantly, most other server systems were largely text-based. With Windows NT, Microsoft brought the power of a graphical interface to mass market server operating systems.
2023-07-27
I’ve worked in this industry a long time now.
From 1981 to 1986, I worked as an engineer for Hewlett-Packard. Yep, I’m “have actually met both Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard” old. They’d retired when I met them and John Young was in charge, but they came to Palo Alto to a shareholders’ meeting and I was there at the time.
Most of my work was on HP3000 commercial mini-computers. The level of engineering on those systems was unlike anything I’d ever seen either before or since. They were really quite superb.
2023-03-05
A while back, I reviewed a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. I mentioned at the time that I nearly didn’t get past the first chapter as I thought it was going to be another pretty cheesy self-help book. But I ended up loving the book. James really made me think about habits in a way that I hadn’t done so before.
And so I was interested when Luke and Phil from Mandarin Blueprint released a new online course called the Habit-Building Bootcamp.
2023-01-18
One weekend many years ago, my youngest daughter Erin was looking for something to do. She was a very creative child so I suggested “why don’t you write a book?”
She said she could write one, if she only had a title. I told her that you could write a book about almost any title. I randomly picked:
What the duck didn’t see
(with the emphasis on didn’t)
To get her started, I wrote some content, then asked her to continue. She did the same, and then I wrote some more. I turned out to be quite fascinating. I had no idea where she was taking the story and I’d be excited to read what she’d written. Along the way, my eldest daughter Kirsty wrote some content as well. My second daughter Andrea’s name was used for the main person in the story.
2022-01-25
