Outside Edge

Periods of our lives increasingly overlap. Work, leisure, holiday. It's often hard to find the space to discover what we actually feel. We are changing all the time. Our feelings to situations progress as we age. Maybe we will meet someone special, maybe we don't. We could have kids perhaps. Those kids might have challenges and we help them because we're parents now and we have responsibilities. We do it because we must, driven by convention and society. We notice our relationships also...

Last week I completed the first draft of my new book One More Island. It's a contemporary novel about a fractured family, and a man discovering that it’s possible to start again in a town he thought he would never return to. Set in the coastal south east of England, it explores the stories families tell, the secrets they keep, and the difficult work of finding your way back to the people you’ve lost. In you've read and enjoyed Human Software you'll recognise the main character, Peter...

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...