I got a new iPad to replace my 2018 iPad Pro. Let me complain about it first.

It bothers me that it’s a computer, yet I can’t easily write my own software on it¹. Sure, there is Swift Playgrounds, but I don’t really want to use Swift. And even if I did, it’s not a proper IDE, it doesn’t support basic features like a debugger. It’s not 1985 any more. There are other languages (Pythonista looks good, though I’ve not tried it), but the vast array of languages that are available on Linux and on the Mac are missing.

I am late to the party. I’m not a purist who is going to tell you that the books are way better than the TV series, that I read the books when they first came out. Well actually, before they came out because I know somebody who knows somebody.

No. I watched the “Slow Horses” show on Apple TV+, enjoyed it, and belatedly thought that I should read the book [affiliate link] to see how similar they are.

I’ve lived in London for thirty years¹. Somehow.

I’m not entirely sure how it happened. It was never the plan. Not that I had a plan. If you’d asked me where I wanted to live, I probably wouldn’t have picked London.

I applied to a handful of jobs at the tail-end of my stint at university². The one job offer I received³ was in London. That’s how it started.

To give you an idea of how arbitrary it all was: my first employer had offices in central London and in Surrey. I looked at the train lines and found that Wimbledon was about half way between the two. That’s where I ended up.

For my first job after university, I worked for a company with a ISO9001 certification. This meant that every project had a complete, documented process for every aspect, from reporting, to finance, to bug tracking, to code formatting.

There was even a team whose sole job was to define the template standards and enforce them across all projects. Most people thought they were busy-bodies, meddling with things they didn’t understand. While the team was staffed by people who had started doing project work, most had not done any for years.

I hear John Elledge a lot on podcasts, so when his new book came out I was immediately interested. I saw it in a bookstore, almost bought it, and then realised that I have more than enough books at home. (Un)fortunately, Amazon were selling it cheap and I caved.

The good news is that “A History of the World in 47 Borders”¹ is an entertaining read. No regrets.

It’s well researched, and full of interesting tidbits, and connecting historical events in logical ways. What stood out for me, though, was the writing. It’s informal, and you get his voice and personality in practically every sentence. Here are a few.

I’ve gone through a number of RSS clients over the years. I used to be a big Google Reader user. I used Reeder on my iPad a lot, and now I use NetNewsWire. To ensure that my feeds are shared between devices, I’ve used Feedly. I’ve paid for it, as I use it a lot and I don’t want it to go away like Google Reader did.

But they keep adding stuff that I have no interest in, including jumping on the AI bandwagon. It has, however, been fast and reliable. I don’t have much to complain about.

In a world where everything is owned by a gargantuan commercial entity, RSS is subversive, an act of rebellion. It harks back to the early days of the Internet where freedom and open standards were the future, rather than Big Data, Big Tech, and Big Lock-in.

RSS is a newsfeed than you define. You subscribe to websites and they give you a list of stories to read. How is that different from social media?

Brent Simmons:

I had a bias about engineers that worked for large corporations. I assumed that they weren’t as good as indies and engineers at small companies

I work for a small company and my clients are usually big companies, so I have some perspective here¹.

From my experience, the difference between working for large and small companies is bureaucracy and focus. A tolerance or affinity for these things means that the people attracted to each are different. Normally when we talk about “bureaucracy,” it’s a pejorative, but that’s not what I mean here. Larger companies need more formal process to function. We can save the argument about good or bad process for another time.

Some of the clients I work with have a very collaborative culture. Decisions are always run past all interested parties and buy-in is required from everyone.

The people in charge set the general direction but not how to do it.

I prefer to work for (and with) companies that are like that because, well, my opinion counts! Having the people who know the work the best make the decisions makes the most sense. People appreciate the autonomy and the trust that management place in them.

I’ve read a lot of Moren’s words over the years, but mostly in Macworld and Six Colors¹. I picked “The Caledonian Gambit²” entirely arbitrarily.

His fiction is… fine. It’s a bit too military to my taste, but with a bunch of spy and action for good measure. There’s some family backstory that feeds into it, leading to a well rounded story. It didn’t fully engage me but I did keep reading, and wanted to know how it ended. There were a few phrases where I thought “he’s trying too hard” but, otherwise, it’s well written.