I’ve struggled to enjoy most computer games for a while. Valve’s Dota 2 is one of the few that I can. It’s most enjoyable when played with friends, so here’s my shameless attempt to convince you to join me.

“Pipeline is a one-day not-for-profit ‘unconference’ event focused on Continuous Delivery”

I was at Pipeline 2015 and it was excellent. Great talks, great people. My particular favourites (taken from the Pipeline Vimeo channel):

Ok I haven’t read everything by Charles Stross but everything I have read has been awesome and I’d recommend it highly.

I guess I’d describe a lot of it as “accessible hard sci-fi”, where the technology isn’t just “magic science” (like much of Star Wars and Star Trek), but its consequences and impact are considered and explored.

At PyCon UK 2014 I gave a talk about The Twelve-Factor App, “a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps”. The Twelve-Factor stance on config - “store [it] in the environment” - is probably the most misunderstood.

I want those misunderstandings to stop. If you feel you disagree with 12factor, or you feel you don’t quite see the benefit or how to do it, then please keep reading. If you’re still not sure afterwards, drop me an email, or find me on IRC; I’d love to talk more.

If you take just one thing away from here, please make it this: 12factor says your applications should read their config from the environment; it has very little to say about how you populate the environment - use whatever works for you

Perks are a poor substitute for a culture built on a stronger, more inclusive foundation.

An excellent article on Model View Culture by Etsy’s Melissa Santos and Rafe Colburn on how startup perks can inadvertently be massively divisive, and harmful to a diverse culture. Really interesting analysis and introspection, plus advice on more inclusive activities and rewards.

Do you like coffee? If so, buy an Aeropress.

Imagine you’re walking out of the front door when you see the postman carrying a bundle of letters. He gives you the top letter because it has your address. You then tell him that the next five are yours too. Without looking to check the address on them, he hands you the next five letters too.

This pretty much describes the action at the core of The Heartbleed Bug. This bug was in the OpenSSL library, which is used for all kinds of encryption, but most noticeably right now: HTTPS, which approximates to “everything secure on the web”.

If you want to understand it more from an in-depth technical perspective, Troy Hunt has written an excellent and detailed article about the bug. I want to explain things to people who didn’t lose yesterday to testing and patching (or to put it another way “this is why I was looking sad and went to the pub at lunchtime”).

If you’re in the business of making “web apps” and haven’t read The Twelve-Factor App I thoroughly recommend rectifying that.

November saw over a hundred “geeks who love the NHS” - developers, doctors, nurses, patients and more - descend on The University Centre in Cambridge for the fifth NHS Hack Day.