Derek Graham

Occasionally on my work laptop a black box pops up with the words "Windows Powershell", and I think "Yes, it probably does."

Reminding myself of maintenance on an early c++ project with at least one file > 17k lines

Extract Method?

…you did so no *new* tools and I’m sure I have a CD laying around here somewhere

Rational Rose?

LLMs, Context Windows & Brown M&Ms An interesting piece of research was published recently that found that the effective maximum context size of Large Language Models is orders of magnitude smaller than the advertised maximum contex…

Van Halen wouldn't have fallen for it!

"I showed GPT-5’s responses to a bunch of people, and more than half didn’t notice the 'Brown M&Ms'. This, I suspect, is what really explains why people perceive the effectiveness of LLMs so differently"

codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/10/03/l...

I could do that in about a parsec, easy

Coffee!

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

YouTube video by Modern Software Engineering Should Test-Driven Development (TDD) Be Used MORE In Software Engineering?

TDD should be more widely used - I recently recorded a conversation with @davefarley77.bsky.social and as ever we found lots to discuss about TDD. We don't always completely agree either: youtu.be/6yb7jKpxTjM?...

Indiana was the name of the dog not the Dr :) Surely they should cycle through Fluffy, Spike, Killer, Rex, Lassie, Fido, Mr Chuckles …

Alan Turing’s blue plaque in St Leonards reads: Alan Turing 1912 - 1954 Founder of computer science and cryptographer, whose work was key to breaking the wartime Enigma code, spent his childhood here.

Portrait of Turing smiling rather frutily.

Today is the anniversary of Alan Turing’s suicide, in 1954.
Turing was the father of modern computing. His codebreaking helped the Allies to win WWII.
Arrested for being gay, he chose chemical castration over a prison sentence. He lost his security clearance, as all homosexuals were deemed a risk.

Border terrier standing on an old tree stump smiling at the camera

The perfect pair

How can an *Equality* and *Human Rights* Commissioner say with a straight face trans people have to accept reduced rights, whether perceived or actual?

A mug of tea with a lilac blossom pattern on it, alongside lilac and Terry Pratchett pin badges.

Happy Glorious 25th of May! GNU Sir Terry Pratchett. How do they rise up?
#Glorious25th #Discworld #TruthJusticeFreedomReasonablyPricedLove #Speakhisname

how do they rise up

happy glorious twenty-fifth of May, let us all wear the lilac in memory of Sir Terry

The future is already here!

'Agentic' means making the suffix of your bash script '.ai' instead of '.sh', and piping through a non-deterministic LLM rather than sed.

You've got this.

Picture of an old 5” black and white crt tv displaying a raspberry pi’s desktop and terminal window.

New vibe coding setup

The Stegasaurus Who Came to Tea? I would read that

Similarly, we don’t reward peeps who ship well-tested code with no bugs, we reward those that stay up all night fighting a production bug and make a show of how hard it was

YouTube video by coneyislandgirl930 Jill Sobule - "Don't Let Us Get Sick" (Warren Zevon)

youtu.be/g1aoA5f8O9g

I'm running my Keeping It Simple masterclass a few times at conferences over the next few months:

Codecamp, Bucharest, 6-7 May
codecamp.ro/masterclasse...

SDD, London, 12 May
sddconf.com/agenda

GOTO Copenhagen, 30 September
gotocph.com/2025/masterc...

paging @eon-next.bsky.social

Javascript call stack showing meter reading page exception.

Unexpected (aren't they all?) @kevlin.bsky.social while trying to submit a meter reading

Complexity Theory predicts that organisational outcomes are more likely to be determined not by individuals, but by the interactions between individuals & groups of individuals.

Any approach to improving effectiveness that focuses on individual performance is likely to fail.

Debugging an ancient odbc problem today with a younger dev and describing the windows .ini file format feels like teaching ancient Mesopotamian languages to The Jetsons