“As $role I want $desire so that $benefit”

I’m growing to love the idea of user stories. A simple short sentence or two capturing someone’s need, providing context to indicate their motivation, and usually specifying little in the way of implementation details.

(Having little experience of pets, and none of anonymous herds of cattle, perhaps “like blood cells, not like limbs” is a better analogy…)

This is a pretty common adage among people working at any kind of scale. I just wish it was more generally accepted.

Reboot your servers often. Destroy and rebuild them often. Poke them, prod them, ensure that your services continue.

This is a long-form version of the talk I gave at PyCon UK 2015. Currently it’s a minimally-fleshed-out copy of my notes, but will receive updates. My (somewhat shouty and terse) slides are available here for download. If video’s more your thing, I’m on the YouTubes.

I want you to document all the things. I want you to write more documentation and I want you to write better documentation.

I just changed all the URLs of my blog posts.

Inspired by Matt Gemmell’s article on Permalinks, I’ve ditched the /year/month/day prefix, so e.g. the URL of this article is now https://blog.doismellburning.co.uk/permalinks/

Spaceteam is a fantastic mobile game for you and some friends to play together.

If I have to ask you a question about how to use your product, your documentation has a bug.

Everyone loves superlatives, especially when I’m the one who gets to choose the efficiency metric so they’re probably not even hyperbole…!

It’s six lines long, and exercises your settings, your URL config, and potentially even much more!

I made a Django project template.

First things first: I don’t think you should use my Django project template for your Django projects. In fact, much like with dotfiles, I don’t think you should ever just use someone else’s template. In the spirit of Yes Minister’s irregular verbs: “I make careful and opinionated curations, you make poor choices, they add pointless bloat”.

What can be useful though, is using them for inspiration and ideas, and I definitely think mine has some things worth taking.

There’s many many important things to consider when writing software; these are just some I find often overlooked and consider particularly important.

This is one of my favourite flow charts:

Image by Kristen Myers Design/Paranoid Shiksa Feminista.

In case you can’t see that, it says: “How to tell if a toy is for boys or girls: a guide. Do you operate the toy with your genitalia? If yes, this toy is not for children. If no, this toy is for either girls or boys”.