Much has been written about the deep cultural significance that orderly queueing holds for the Briton. The opportunities it offers to display impeccable manners – and scowl at interlopers – are so rich that I’ve lost count of the number of serious, extended conversations I’ve had about the do’s and don’ts, the Ps and Qs, of waiting for service. As a programmer, though, it’s also interesting that there are clear parallels between core data structures found in computer science and the approaches to queueing found around the world.

tl;dr I don’t think so, and created Full Stop as a way for us to share dotfile tooling while staying agnostic about the content. In “Dotfiles Are Meant to Be Forked”, Zach Holman points out that we all benefit through sharing the efficiency-boosting tips, tricks, and tools many of us have in our dotfiles, and I completely agree. However, I think it’s important to draw a distinction between the tooling around dotfiles, and the content of the dotfiles themselves.

At Teespring we have quarterly hackathons. We all throw suggestions into a melting-pot of ideas in the run-up to the event, with the most promising, most interesting, and most popular suggestions graduating to be hacked upon by a small team for a couple of days. A friend of mine at DODOcase had given me a couple of Google Cardboard-based virtual reality viewers that I hadn’t gotten around to playing with yet, and this hackathon was the perfect opportunity to have a play!

The tl;dr At the moment – and for the foreseeable future – the power balance of hiring negotiations favours the engineering candidates rather than with the hiring company. One consequence of this is that any attempt to hurry, strong-arm, or manipulate candidates will likely be ineffective, and could potentially backfire horribly. This is how I became one such backfire. The offer I had been lucky enough to receive an offer to join Widget Co.

Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet and Watch. We think of it as the tongue-in-cheek mnemonic for recalling the sign of the cross. But is this all that it signifies? I think not. It’s become clear to me that infamous technophile, Pope Francis, has leveraged his position as head of the Catholic church to inflect the product roadmap of everyone’s favourite search behemoth: Google. Let’s look at news around recent product launches for Google:

I was recently asked: what’s the worst project you ever worked on? After a quick scan through my mental graveyard of half-finished, half-assed ideas too embarrassing for me to dignify with a link here, I settled upon my first job out of university. The company I was hired as a Software Engineer by IBM, to work out of their main UK development laboratory, Hursley Park, home of the mighty CICS, WebSphere MQ and MessageBroker products.

I was always told to prize gifts that people had put time and effort into. Hoping my SO shared the same view, I decided to make her a little something for her birthday. Being creatively barren, I attempted plagiarism. I remembered seeing this Kickstarter project ages ago. It’s based on an old parlour game: the idea is to conceal little messages inside a nice-looking block, to be popped out with a pencil when the recipient feels like it.