This is a kind of follow-up article to a previous article about pairs ancient and modern for security. That article discussed how pairs help with security in old physical documents and objects, and also in modern electronic ones. This article goes into palimpsests and other ways of partially erasing things, for old physical things and … Continue reading Palimpsests ancient and modern
Category: Communicating
Writing, visualisations etc.
Analysing the radio alphabet
If you have tried to spell out the letters of a name, or give a (UK) post code or car registration number over the phone, the person at the other end of the conversation might have misheard what you said. One solution to this is to use the radio alphabet (also known as the NATO … Continue reading Analysing the radio alphabet
Arts and humanities in computing
You might work in software because you just like to build cool things. I understand this, and I also like to geek out about things like balanced trees and coupling and cohesion. However, you're probably building something to solve a problem for someone, rather than just building for the sake of it. Whose problem are … Continue reading Arts and humanities in computing
Debugging how conversations go at work
This article is trying to help programmers and people like them, when they have conversations at work that are about understanding, explaining, deciding etc. It’s not so much about persuasion or selling, or mentoring or coaching. These are all important kinds of conversations, but I’m not the person to help you with them. It might … Continue reading Debugging how conversations go at work
What motivates your technical writing?
I recently received a letter from my bank that was meant to explain something, but it didn’t. This reminded me of a fruitful conversation I had with someone on the Ministry of Testing slack community, about what motivations people might have for writing. In this post I’ll try to dig into that a bit, in … Continue reading What motivates your technical writing?
Just detail can lead to poor documentation
I've been around computers long enough to have encountered one problem many times. It's a problem that seems to be almost built-in to computers: poor documentation. In this article I'll focus on documentation of code that you use via its source code, e.g. an API, toolkit etc. There are mental tools you possibly already use … Continue reading Just detail can lead to poor documentation
Organising technical documents for a good user experience
I was doing some technical writing at work recently, and I realised that I had automatically and unconsciously used a particular structure for the document. It’s not something that geeks like me are always taught – I know it only because my Dad used to help people improve their technical writing. So, in case it’s … Continue reading Organising technical documents for a good user experience
Describing films and code using pictures
This article is the combination of a few different things. For a long time, I’ve wanted to visualise in some way the details of the plot to the film Ocean’s 11. Also, occasionally I get grumpy about decrees about how people should document their code. Finally, I recently attended a talk given by my friend … Continue reading Describing films and code using pictures
Blogging
A friend recently talked to me about blogging, and it got me navel gazing a bit. I’ve not really thought about how or why I blog, and I guess it’s a good thing to be a reflective practitioner. At the risk of being self-indulgent, this is an article about how and why I blog. As … Continue reading Blogging
Turn the information up to 11
Much of the job of communication is to pass on information to someone. When we design a user interface, it communicates on our behalf. When we write code, including test code, we communicate our purpose for the code to someone else (which could be a future version of ourselves). Sometimes we communicate more obviously and … Continue reading Turn the information up to 11
Random Tech Thoughts 