Outside Edge

Did anyone pick up a copy of Cat Hicks' Psychology of Software Teams this week? I'm reading it right now and will post a review soon. Lots to think about in there around resilience and sustainable software practice. I have a feeling that I'll be referring to it a lot! It's also made me realise that I talk about many similar themes in Human Software - on-call pressure, burnout, loss of trust at work, group dynamics, Conway's law, rubber ducking! It's all there. And so with that in mind, I've...

Happy Sunday and welcome to the final edition of The Human Engineer. But what? What’s happening? Well, actually I’m not going anywhere, but this feels like the right moment to announce a reboot. When I started this newsletter over four and half years ago, it was about software engineering with a social angle. Over time, though, I've realised that isn't quite what I'm writing about anymore. I've been writing and reading more fiction, but more importantly I've been paying attention to the kinds...

I just discovered this fully written newsletter in the outbox - unsent. Here's what I was thinking a few week's ago. I'm pleased to say nothing has moved on significantly. -- It's the May Day bank holiday and I'm sitting in my office on the 10th floor overlooking Amstelveen city centre. Amstelveen is a suburb of Amsterdam, attached to it via a Metro and tram way which makes the city centre very accessible. However, I'm not going there today because it's going to be hot and full of hot...

The After (at the back) I finally headed back to work this week. Over the last few months, I've often felt like I was going around in the circles and that, in fact, was quite close to the truth. I first posted on LinkedIn that I was "Open to Work" at the start of November it's taken about six months to land a new gig. Why so long? A few things. I'm older, there's AI, and it is a tough market but at the beginning I certainly had plenty of interest both from the network and from recruiters....

It's amazing how dependent we are on paperwork even in 2026. I spent a few hours this week printing forms, signing them, scanning them, uploading them. Automation has brought us so far ... and yet. I tried to use Claude to help me design some shelves above the washing machine and honestly it was easier just to use my own head. AI is sometimes an exhausting tool to use. One of those forms was for a new job — starting in a couple of weeks. More on that soon. The bigger news: Human Software has...

Conference season hit Amsterdam last month with the global juggernaut that is Kubecon but I eschewed the noise of that particular enormous techie event and went instead to the writer-friendly event "Stories Unfold" at Amsterdam's OBA theatre. This was a very pleasant evening giving a selection of self-published and traditionally published authors a stage to share the stories behind their books and also highlighted a new compilation of short stories. The audience was very much made up of...

Twenty years ago I was living in Taunton in the South-West of the UK and travelling by car to work in Bournemouth to work for a big, famous American investment bank as a technical consultant. I'd been hired to be part of a helpdesk which was on-call to supply first line support to portfolio managers who were booking trades for their clients. But me being a techie, I was there to bring technical expertise and solutions to a team that was struggling. I aced the assignment. Providing a technical...

January is over. The longest month! I managed to get a break in Chamonix, nominally to do some skiing, but for the most part it was marvelling at the beauty of it all. The world around us. So, I'm in the alps taking a break from the uncertainty of the present and facing my own mortality on the gentlest slopes near Mont Blanc. It's wonderful being up there with friends, I feel very lucky, and I also don't feel any real need to push myself like I would have done in the older days. I went out...

A few weeks before Christmas I asked ChatGPT a series of questions along the lines of "ok, so what next?" I was out of ideas. I was tired. My freelance contract was coming to an end so I was already looking for a new one. Launching Human Software had been exhilarating but exhausting. I'd burned the candle at both ends on social media plus done some podcasts (a few of which are yet to see the light of day) and also put myself in front of bookshops and chased reviews and talked talked talked...