Packing List for Family Adventure
While we were preparing for this big Latin American Adventure, I aspired to travel as lightly as possible. I knew we’d be in and out of taxis, trucks and hi...
Posts by Year
2020
Ten spurious tips for adventure travel with kids
As I write, we are enjoying the last few days of our time in Mexico, but we are looking forward to an early return home. After 90 days of adventure, we’ve s...
2019
Machu Picchu
When I was in the 6th grade, I made a poster of Machu Picchu for Geography class. Some sketchy middle-school facts, some hand lettering, and a roughly glued...
Pisac in Pictures
Pisac is a small town at the opposite end of the Sacred Valley from Machu Picchu. The town sits just off the Vilcanota River and is crowned with a pretty sp...
Starting our Adventure in Lima
Kicking off our big Latin American Adventure in Lima, Peru
Why I am running away to South America
One week from today, I will be on my way to South America. I’m leaving the UK for the winter, like a bird chasing the sun across the sea to warmer lands.
2016
Not Promoter Score
Comic - Popups appear at the worst of times
Tech leaders, express yourself
As a tech lead, you had better be able to express yourself. Not the woolgathering flights of fancy, where “We could do ___”. But concrete examples. Hard d...
2014
Force of Habit: Day 100 / Just getting started
Today is the 100th day of this grand experiment I set off on when I left full time employment in September. If I’m honest, I’m not where I thought I’d be aft...
Force of Habit: Week 1 Review
A week has passed since I started this whole crazy personal R&D project, so I thought it was a good time to review the last seven days.
Force of Habit: Day 9 / RepRap Z-Axis Build
It’s alive! (sort of) There’s a point in most projects where you’ve been building lots of components and disparate parts and it feels like it’s never going t...
Force of Habit: Day 4 / RepRap Y-Axis build
Building the RepRap print bed / Y-Axis Another stage of the RepRap build done today. The bed came together and there’s another installment of the timelapse ...
Force of Habit: Day 3 / RepRap build & RPi Camera Faff
After a championship faffing and distraction session this morning, I finally got down to some RepRap building in the afternoon. I had just enough time to pu...
Force of Habit: Day 1
Things are already starting to change. I just ran out to my workshop because I had forgotten to tin my soldering iron before I locked up for the night.
Force of Habit: A 100 day personal creative revolution
Today I’m starting my funemployment, a period where I normally recharge batteries after an intense time with a company or project. In past years, its been a...
Zen Park Picnic
I hit the park this afternoon for lunch. Was preoccupied as usual. Thinking about work. About all the opportunities I might be giving up by moving on. By ...
Exit interview yourself
Every Friday afternoon, write down everything that you would recommend in your exit interview. Be exhaustive. Be specific.
2013
Web Performance Sing-a-long
I returned from Velocity Conference Europe 2013 today, just in time to get my two daughters to bed. Before we shuffled up to brush teeth and read stories, I ...
Successful Cultural Scaling
Successful scaling of an organisation depends on:
Three Managers
The Rookie - “Why doesn’t anything get done?!?”
You don’t own culture, you are culture
We’ve been wringing our hands about our startup’s culture recently. Like any successful startup, we are not only growing our team but we’re adjusting and ad...
2012
Product development is language
Product development is like learning a foreign language. You must raise yourself above the embarrassment and uncertainty of knowing how to express your idea...
OSX gestures for emacs scrolling
I’m now working in a Ruby on Rails team, which means I’m collaborating with a lot of TextMate users on a daily basis. I’ve been an Emacs user for years, and...
2011
Help me upcycle my old technology
As an old and seasoned geek, I’ve accumulated my fair share of outdated technology over the years. You know the stuff: old laptops, giant mobile phones and t...
An emacs helper function for theming Drupal views
Theming Drupal Views can be a long and tedious process. Every friendly configuration click that the CMS user is given, comes at the cost of grey hairs and e...
2009
Outlook Web Access InboxZero Smackdown
Playing nice with email Anyone who works with clients or full-time employers, will sooner or later, find themselves faced with the supposed convenience of us...
Fabric first steps - Directory creation
Fabric is a tidy tool for deployment that neatly wraps up fussy, manual tasks into a tidy Python syntax. The simple API wraps up most of your common deployme...
Fabric - Installation
In this article from our Fabric series, I’m going to show you how to get set up with Fabric on your development environment. We’ll get down to installing the...
ANT vs Fabric - Evolving tools for website deployment
In my development work for Clockwork Robot, I have always used the ANT build tool for packaging and deploying client sites. I chose ANT for its platform inde...
Drupal an Enterprise ready solution
Amid all the hype and momentum that is building around adoption of Drupal for sites of all sizes, there remains a bitter skepticism that Drupal is, or ever w...
Goodie Bag - DrupalCon Paris 2009
No convention is complete without a giveaway bag of knick-knacks and propaganda handed to you at the door. DrupalCon Paris 2009 is no exception, with a custo...
Five tips for attending geek conferences
From time to time, work creeps up on you and sucks every last drop of knowledge and energy from you as you push from project to deadline to client to deliver...
Relaunch of omphe.com
Regular visitors to omphe.com will notice that we’ve undergone a major overhaul of the site. All of the professional information pertaining to freelance web...