My hand holding the stylishly designed book cover up for the camera.
Just arrived! New edition of @ewebber.bsky.social's Building Successful Communities of Practice book, I look forward to seeing what's changed in 10 years.
I led a team that built a state bank from scratch in 15 months.
Including the banking engine.
It handles around £3 billion a year.
This story utterly baffles me.
right now the astronauts are calling houston because the computer on the spaceship is running two instances of microsoft outlook and they can't figure out why. nasa is about to remote into the computer
Second blog post pulled together from my coaching notes.
Reading old notes and thinking about what I’ve tried with this topic has been helpful — there’s lots of good techniques I used to use but it’s easy to slip out of the habit.
neil-vass.com/coaching-und...
After averaging zero XP Manchesters for many years, I might be getting in good habits! Had fun at the connascence one last month and I'm going again this week for an argument about AI. Anyone else going to this?
groups.google.com/g/xp-manches...
Things move fast in the world of speed cubing... in between me drafting this post, and publishing, I missed that there had been a new world record set for solving the 3x3 cube.
You get 15 seconds of inspection time, then start solving. New time to beat: 2.76 seconds!
youtu.be/_ddj1qvXJ0s?...
Photo of me holding the book. Its cover has the title with an appropriate image next to each word (painting of cherry blossoms next to Spring, green leafy tree next to Summer, a cartoon Asteroid with a flaming trail, and a painting of a bird). Subtitle is "The art of Eastern storytelling".
Now reading: Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird by Henry Lien. It's sent me to watch Parasite before coming back to read its analysis, then off to play some classic Nintendo games.
"I won't linger on Zelda games more for fear of never stopping, which is a very real danger, but..."
3rd annual Agile in the Ether, In Real Life meetup was this month!
As always, I left with piles of things I want to look into further.
neil-vass.com/a-list-of-li...
February 2nd: it's groundhog day!
A good day to re-listen to 2 amazing podcast episodes, short stories inspired by that movie. Much recommend.
Part 1:
www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/epi...
#AdventOfCode reflections, mostly avoiding spoilers.
neil-vass.com/advent-of-co...
Developer attempts to replicate "Liquid Glass" in CSS, and once finished realizes what she'd actually created is an exploit for a fundamental, previously unknown, and rather serious browser vulnerability
lyra.horse/blog/2025/12...
"CSS hack accidentally becomes regular hack"
Or, if you'd like a look at my code so far, here you go:
github.com/neil-vass/ad...
If you see anything and think "I wouldn't do it like that in Go", I'm happy to hear it! I'm sure I'm missing some good tricks.
Fun #AdventOfCode this year :)
It's always good to hide spoilers, so I'm posting on Mastodon behind handy content warnings so people can avoid looking at days they haven't solved yet.
Have a look if you like, good for some "Neil is brand new to Go and making a right mess of it" laughs I'm sure:
Also, please do NOT self-exclude if you think your platform is small or that you don't have one, or you are junior career or not a developer. I like sending things to YOU, too. Sharing one thing with friends and coworkers once in a while is enough to count as sharing an impression :)
I have a December gift for you all 🎁
I am finally able to open up a general call for ADVANCE READERS for my book: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOFTWARE TEAMS (coming 2026). I cannot tell you how much it means to me to share this!
Indicate your interest here:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
The Limits of Genius (UK title) / Edison's Ghosts (US title)
Hey! You! Do you like... learning things? Do you like... laughing?? Do you like... being that annoying person in the conversation who gets to say "um ACTUALLY Einstein wasn't even that smart he couldn't even swim and he KEPT falling in the ocean and making people save him"?
Then you'll LOVE my book
Yesterday's news: "rage bait is word of the year".
Today's news' "Die Hard is not a Christmas movie"
🤬😡👿💢
www.theguardian.com/film/2025/de...
For those who want a systems focused advent to wind up the year, it’s begun!
Daily posts will refresh here: www.ruthmalan.com/Advent.html
And will be posted to the page for the day (which will also hold notes and links to work people share here or on their own blog, etc.).
#AdventOfSystemSeeing
Featuring Nine Inch Nails, a book about Pentium assembly instructions, and my dog Archie.
@jukes.ie once gave advice that you should write for an audience of one: your future self. I certainly seem to be taking that to heart, not sure who else would care about this bunch of things :)
A post about one way I got a little better at tricky #AdventOfCode puzzles, and learned some lessons that come in handy outside of once-a-year Christmas themed coding puzzles too.
neil-vass.com/optimising-l...
Corner cases, they suck! Got part A in seconds, and then part B had me stumped 20 minutes debugging! #AdventOfCode day 1: github.com/lizthegrey/a...
Reminder: Please throttle your #AdventOfCode traffic
Please don't make frequent automated requests - avoid sending requests more often than once every 15 minutes (900 seconds).
www.reddit.com/r/adventofco...
What are code security basics us devs should know about? I turned to Johannes Dahse, a security expert for 20+ years, for his thoughts and tactics
Watch or listen:
• YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=urVf...
• Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5cOk...
• Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...
Oh god this is sweet: vole.wtf/doctype/ "’80s BASIC type-in mags are back, but this time for HTML! 10 wonderful web apps, including games, toys, puzzles and utilities."
I spent days typing in Basic and Hex-code on the C64, and i will NEVER do it again. Still, this is sweet!
looking for CSS animation experts for something fun in December 👀
