My things

 

I left New Zealand at the end of 2017 and moved first to Ireland. At the time, leaving most of my belongings behind did not seem particularly dramatic or permanent. International relocations are complicated enough without trying to move an entire household at the same time, and my reasoning was straightforward: I would first establish myself in Europe, understand where I was going to live permanently, find a suitable home, and then organise the shipment of everything that remained in New Zealand. I had no reason to believe that this would become anything more than a temporary logistical arrangement. That assumption turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Ireland did not become my permanent destination. In May 2019 I moved again, this time to Germany, and started the process of establishing a new life in Berlin. Even then, I could not simply order a container and bring everything immediately. I had only just arrived in the country, I was dealing with all the usual administrative req...

In my previous post about this personal C++ project, I described why I had chosen table and seating organisation as the problem I wanted to work on. The next question was more fundamental: what are the objects? It is tempting when developing a desktop application to start with the visible parts. Create the main window. Add a guest list. Add a table editor. Put some buttons around them. Connect a few signals and slots, and very quickly there is something on the screen that looks like progress. I am deliberately trying not to begin there. Before concentrating on the screens, I want a reasonably coherent model of the problem itself. The user interface should eventually manipulate that model; it should not accidentally become the model. My first architectural objective is simple: model an event as a collection of meaningful domain objects before allowing the graphical interface to dictate how those objects behave. Starting with the domain rather than the...

 

Log Episode 1 [Mon, Aug 3, 2026] - 2026-Sep-01 Episode 2 [Mon, Aug 10, 2026] - 2026-Sep-03 Episode 3 [Mon, Aug 17, 2026] - 2026-Sep-03 Episode 4 [Mon, Aug 24, 2026] - 2026-Sep-03

Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 20 March 2026 A few years ago, while managing a DevOps team at a very large start-up, I was invited to attend a company-wide global event in San Francisco. My hotel was close to the venue. Thanks to jet lag, I was awake much earlier than expected and had nothing particularly useful to do. I decided to walk over and look around while the event space was still being prepared. At one point, I noticed an older gentleman sitting alone at a table. Apart from a few people organising the venue, there was almost nobody else around. I am naturally fairly extroverted, so I collected some breakfast—the food was already available—and joined him. We began talking. A conversation without titles He was funny, relaxed and easy to speak with. Our conversation had nothing to do with company strategy, technology or careers. We spoke about life, travel and whatever observations emerged naturally. I did not ask what position he held. He did not ask how senior...