Category: Uncategorized

My “Psychology of Software Teams” book keeps giving me gold. Today @grimalkina gave me “Mastery Orientation” and “Performance Orientation” as… are they approaches? Traits? I’m not sure. But it ties into a lot of online discourse about tech (IMO – IANAP) and pulls on many other threads.

Nicer things: we obeyed the instruction to not feed birds over the hot summer to prevent spread of disease.

But they came looking yesterday. Juvenile starlings hopping around looking for seed on the ground.

It’s cooler now. So I put the feeder up.

And they entertained me all day.

Even the robin came to visit!

And one of the foxes wandered by too!

Delightful.

I don’t really know why I felt the need to share this.

Perhaps it’s a lesson in customer service.

If you mess up – or if your contractor messes up – don’t double down on being right. Don’t shrug off blame. Don’t ignore the customer’s feelings and requests. Own it. Fix it. Apologise.

It is possible to rescue a screw up. It’s also possible to show that you really don’t care.

These last few weeks I experienced some of the worst eCommerce customer service.

To the extent that when I decided it was too much hassle and asked for cancellation and refund, they blamed the courier and just said “We are not at fault here and will ship the goods on Tuesday.”

They ignored my instructions twice, in fact. When Evri didn’t work, they shipped it via DHL. But to the Evri collection point. I queried this and they said Evri had some arrangement with DHL.

Reader: they do not!

Which resulted in an embarrassing trip to my local shop who had kindly taken a random DHL parcel in for me. They were not happy about it.

The supplier have not used the word “sorry” once in our exchanges. In fact, they were pretty rude and took no responsibility at all.

Awful.

All for 6 bottles of beer.

It’d better be good!!

Amazing. Wordle … but for Discworld fans.

https://fediscience.org/@MarcSchulder/109959299436621834

Does Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” but for HTML exist?

There’s header, footer, section, div, ul, li and svg;
Small and span and audio, thead, tfoot and tbody;
There’s button, fieldset, form input, option, select, anchor and p;
Em, script, aside, address, hgroup, nav, iframe, code, strong, sup and pre

Lots of people talking about 1Password alternatives.

Two that I’ve come across that I don’t see mentioned are:
– AliasVault (open source and self-hostable, but with hosted plans)
– Mega Pass – is Mega bad too? https://mega.io/pass

Any opinions on these?

I should be a software philosopher. I love stuff like this from @jessitron: “Legacy software is software that is not alive in a person’s head” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvr0klVxw5c)

I also love, from @grimalkina’s book: “software ecosystems are vast networks of many people’s solutions that supercharge individual problem solving … these solutions are shared across *both time and space*” (my emphasis).

Powerful stuff.

Something positive/creative…

I’m enjoying making a habit tracker (yes, 25 years in software and never done it!). Hand-coded using my small site template: https://github.com/rosswintle/small-site-template

Trying to use components and keep data well structured and realising that the template doesn’t handle this well.

Have added “slots” though! 😃

Content warning:Death of a friend, awful diseases, swearing (of the highly-appropriate variety).

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Just spent some time properly reflecting on the life of an amazing guy that was taken from us by cancer far too young.

A smart, funny, kind and generous man that the world will miss. A lot!

My life followed his, step by step, for some of the way. It was a real privilege.

Fucking devastating.

I’m thinking about who gets value out of LLMs doing coding.

If a website or app only exists because an LLM did most of the work, did the LLM provide value to the end user?

Re: the Nancy Grace space observatory.

I don’t see how a Lagrange point can be orbited. That’s such a weird thing.

Gonna have to look that up.

I bought “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” for £3.29 today and it’s been a lot of fun with my kids.

A great deal for a fun, co-op, puzzle-solving game that’s helping us get through the last bit of the school holidays.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/keep-talking-and-nobody-explodes

One of the dilemmas of the current technological age:

How do you know if a new piece of software will be secure, sustainable, trustworthy, in the long term? Or if someone just made a vibe coded thing and launched it to make a quick buck?

https://rosswintle.uk/2026/08/my-new-favourite-habit-tracker-is-vibe-coded-i-dont-know-what-to-do-about-it/

It seems that one of my roles in life now is scaring relatives into upgrading 9-year-old smartphones that no longer get security updates. Yes, I hate upgrade cycles too. But the internet is a dangerous place to hang out.

Can anyone hear Ollie a fingerboard?

I’ve tried so many times. Watched so many videos. I just can’t get the thing to leave the ground. Have y’all got blue tack fingers???