Posts

Last week I published a reflective post on how agentic coding has changed my working day and the shape of the profession. I now want to turn to the other side of that coin: not the philosophy, but the mechanics — the habits, the workflows, the accumulated tricks that turn agentic coding from an occasionally impressive demo into a dependable way of working. This post is my field manual. It’s what I’ve learned over the past few months, mostly by getting things wrong and slowly figuring out better approaches. Your mileage will vary, but all of this is what I actually do, now, on a working Thursday in April 2026. ...

At the start of 2026, my working day looked roughly as it had done for the past couple of decades. I would open my IDE in the morning, and close it in the evening, and in between I would write code by typing it into a window designed for that purpose. Carefully and diligently, always trying to envisage myself as a journeyman stonecutter whose work would ultimately be part of some great cathedral of code. ...

“Would it help if we reduced the number of questions from fifteen to ten?” That was the response when I asked what I had thought was a fairly ordinary question: “What’s the algorithm?” I had just joined a small marketing company that had decided it was actually a new media IT company. They had landed a project connected with Pedigree Chum and the Crufts Dog Show. Their big idea was to build a little interactive exhibit called Selectadog. Visitors would amble over to a stand, answer a series of questions about their lifestyle, and the software would recommend the perfect breed of dog for them. ...

I was in two minds about whether to bother writing up my annual review of the books I most enjoyed this year. Then I saw a LinkedIn post from my erstwhile colleague Majd Yafi saying how much he enjoys these end‑of‑year reading round‑ups, and my wife added that they make me seem “more human”. That felt like reason enough, particularly in a year marked by an ever‑increasing tide of AI‑generated prose. ...

Back at the start of 2019, when the NHS App had just launched, it had something of a discoverability problem. The kind of problem where people would type “NHS App” into the App Store search bar and be presented with results including Microsoft Outlook, WhatsApp, Candy Crush and in fact pretty much anything but the NHS App. Not ideal for a flagship digital health intervention. I was contracting as part of the Kainos team helping NHS Digital deliver the App, alongside partners from BJSS. We’d toiled long and hard during 2018 to build a thing that could handle login, appointments, repeat prescriptions, medical record, and more. But what good is your lovingly crafted digital gateway to the NHS if nobody can find it? ...

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Betweening When you’re in between contracts, it’s easy to feel like you’re stuck in limbo. Professionally adrift, spiritually buffering, half-dressed in last Thursday’s joggers. You refresh LinkedIn. You reword your bio again. You stare into the fridge like it’s about to make you an offer. Somewhere around day four, with no stand-ups to attend, no Jira tickets to nurture, and a growing sense that time had lost its formatting, I decided that the only rational move was to make a list of things to do. ...

I lost my contract this week. A narrowing of scope. A bit of internal restructuring. The kind of small shift that leaves no room for a tech lead who only joined the project a few months ago. It stings a bit, of course, but not in a way that surprises me any longer. I’ve been in the game long enough to know that not every project will cross the finish line and make it into production. Sometimes, it’s not even a matter of tripping before the ribbon, it’s that someone quietly packs away the course and decides that the race never needed to be run in the first place. ...

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. ...