Between Systems and Sunlight

My contract with NHS England has come to an abrupt end sooner than expected following a narrowing of focus within the Digital Prevention Services Portfolio. The team I was leading — designing and building components of a National Screening Platform — has been stood down. The work: making legacy health data interoperable and event-driven, surfacing screening journeys in the mighty NHS App, and integrating with ageing systems that only whispered their secrets under moonlight. Standard stuff. ...

In the early hours of Sunday morning, my daughter Isla was admitted to hospital with tonsillitis so severe she could no longer swallow. As a parent, it was a worrying time. As a tech lead working on national health infrastructure, it was quietly illuminating. I’m currently helping to build the National Screening Platform for NHS England — a set of systems designed to make the flow of patient data smoother, more interoperable, and ultimately more useful, hopefully leading to cost savings and better health outcomes for the country’s citizens. But this weekend, I wasn’t a developer or a technical architect. I was just a sleep-deprived dad, waiting anxiously by a bedside. ...

There’s no television in our shared family living areas any more. The imposing screen that once sat at the heart of the home, the altar of sofas and the focus of countless evenings, has been repurposed. It now lives in Matthew’s playroom, where it serves primarily as a large Xbox monitor. And you know what? I don’t miss it. Jocelyn and I just don’t seem to watch television these days. It’s not a moral stance or a lifestyle trend, it’s been more of a drift. A quiet migration away from passive consumption toward something else. ...

Once upon a desk, there was always a notebook. In the older photos of my computer setups that I shared recently, charting the rise and fall of my monitor empire, you can usually spot a notebook or journal somewhere on the desk. Often it was a trusty Pukka Pad. Occasionally, when I was in my more self-consciously pretentious moods, it was a Moleskine or Leuchtturm 1917. Between 2017 and 2023 it tended to be a Self Journal, as I had been lured by their science-backed system. These were always nearby, always half-full of scribbled goals, tasks, reflections, and random facts and figures about my day. ...

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I firmly believed that my productivity was directly proportional to the number of screens on my desk. One screen? You’re a civilian. Two? Getting serious. Three? Welcome to the big leagues. Four? Now we’re talking. Five? You, sir, are a professional. Possibly even a Bond villain. For much of my adult life – from 1997 to 2022 — I was on a one-man mission to surround myself with glass rectangles. I wanted dashboards, terminals, Slack, Outlook, scrolling logs, live bond market charts, rolling 24-hour news, and maybe even some code all visible at once, like a NASA flight director minus the buzzcut and the cigarette. I told myself that it was efficient. That more screens meant more throughput. That toggling amounted to waste. ...

There are moments in the lifecycle of a project – quiet, almost undetectable ones – that act as inflection points. Not the big set-piece go-live days, with all the nervous Splunk-watching that entails. Not the kick-offs, not the design sign-offs. Just those little glimmers of “Oh, this is actually working.” One of those glimmers happened today. We’re a relatively new team, starting to build a new product, led by me – still only eight weeks into the role. ...

I know, I know, you’ve heard all this before. Once again Ian is migrating his blog from one platform to another. And yes, it’s true that I have spent more of my life converting my blog posts between different platforms and markup languages than I ever have actually writing the damn blog posts in the first place. There’s a certain pleasing symmetry to it. I began my blogging life in the late 1990s with nothing more than some hand-rolled HTML, a text editor, and a dial-up connection. Over the years I have moved my content over to various platforms: .Text, Community Server, WordPress (twice!), GraffitiCMS, Ghost, and now I find myself almost back where I began. ...

Since 2018 I’ve been reading far more than I used to. Partly that’s because my kids have grown older and don’t need quite as much of my time (though they still seem to need quite a lot of money). But it’s also thanks to Audible. I’ve been listening to audiobooks while I walk the dog, potter about the house, and commute — effectively turning previously “wasted” time into surprisingly rich reading hours. ...

For most of my adult life, in a way typical of those of us from the North, I have disdained London. Too big. Too busy. Too smug. Too… London. I’ve long maintained that its gravitational pull distorts the rest of the country, and that one’s quality of life improves in direct proportion to one’s distance from Zone 1. And yet — I am beginning to suspect that, deep down, behind my carefully-curated facade, I really rather like it. ...

Back in 2022, in a bid to outwit my mother in our daily Wordle battles, I wrote some C# code to explore optimal starting guesses. You can read about that experiment here. Fast forward two years, and my Wordle addiction is alive and well. The daily challenge remains as compelling as ever, but it’s the family WhatsApp group – where scores are shared, victories boasted, and failures commiserated – that adds an extra layer of fun. ...

As 2024 draws to a close, I’ve taken some time to reflect on the books that made the greatest impact on me this year. From deep dives into technology and politics to introspective reads on life and risk, these are the titles that enriched my year – and might just enrich yours too. If you pressed me on the subject, I would say that my very favourite book of 2024 was Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher. ...

I had the pleasure of spending ISO Week 42 in the beautiful Portuguese coastal city of Porto, attending the NDC Porto 2024 conference for software developers by NDC Conferences. It’s been a long time since I attended a multi-day conference – perhaps even as long ago as Software Architect 2007 (where I first learned about Dependency Injection and IOC Containers) which makes me feel quite ancient. Having been a freelancer since 2008, it’s often difficult to justify taking time out to attend conferences, no matter how valuable they might be to one’s career in the longer term. The face cost of the conference ticket is usually dwarfed by the loss of contract income (real or perceived) whilst being unable to bill a client. ...

Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within by Rory Stewart My very favourite book of 2023 was this autobiography by former Minister and one-time candidate for Conservative Party leader Rory Stewart. I almost didn’t read it at all, as I was feeling a little jaded with politics at the time and considering a more light-hearted Audible purchase. I’m glad I plumped for this though, and it did offer some light relief in the form of Stewart’s dodgy accents when recounting conversations with fellow politicians of all parties and nationalities. ...

Folks, this is your lucky day — Ian Nelson is back on the market. After an unprecedented five years working the same gig, I will be available for shiny new contract roles from February 2023 (edit: now April 2023, thanks to a short extension). Download my CV here. Email me at ian@iannelson.uk What I’ve Been Doing Recently Since March 2018 I’ve been a Technical Lead for the NHS App, an England-wide way to access a range of NHS services via smartphone, tablet, and desktop web browser. It has been an amazing project to be a part of, and I’ve loved working in an open, collaborative, and agile delivery environment alongside a bunch of clever people from NHS Digital, Kainos, and BJSS. ...

The Top 5 Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari My favourite book of the year partially covers the same ground as previous favourites A World Without Email, Four Thousand Weeks, and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. But the scope of Hari’s work is much broader than these. Rather than merely telling us to stop doomscrolling Twitter and get on with life, he covers a multiplicity of factors and forces that are combining to steal the ability of many of us to focus. Social media, pollution, lack of sleep, poor diet, overwork and more are all discussed, with many pointers to third-party research. ...