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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. ...

Yesterday morning I arose unusually early for a Saturday and drove eastwards to attend this year’s DDDNorth at the University of Hull. These free, community-driven events held at the weekend offer an invaluable opportunity to learn from peers in the industry in a relaxed environment. Five concurrent sessions in each timeslot means that tough decisions often have to be made about which to attend! In acknowledgement of my maturing years (I’ve been reading up on optimal stopping) and the niche that I have carved out for myself, I chose to stick to those sessions that focused on backend and distributed architecture and development. ...

Ben: “Ian, Ian!” Me: “Ben, I’m ‘Daddy’ to you.” Ben (quizzically): “But you are ‘Ian’ as well.” Me: “Yes, I know that, but I’d prefer it if you called me ‘Daddy’.” Ben: “Oh. Sorry, Ian!” August 2010 Ben: “Can I have another bedtime story Dad?” Me: “Not tonight Ben, it’s too late and you’re too tired.” Ben: “I’m not, I’m not, grumbled Ben!” August 2010 Whilst sat at the dinner table this evening: ...

Another visit to Stanage Edge to admire the mighty Stanage Pole. This time with my daughter Isla in tow, rather than my mum. Strava link

Another enjoyable day out scrambling with my daughter Isla. The scramble itself is part of Route 27 in Scrambles In The Dark Peak by Tom Corker and Terry Sleaford. A wander along the north-western edge of the Kinder Scout plateau afforded some impressive views across to Manchester. We joined the Pennine Way for a short while, before heading back down the Snake Path. Strava link

Like (it would seem) most of the rest of humanity, the start of my 2022 has been immeasurably enhanced by starting each day playing Josh Wardle’s charming word game Wordle. Which got me wondering – what are the best starter words to play in the opening lines at Wordle? I have been habitually using “ADIEU” as my starter word, reasoning that it contains a large number of vowels. But is D a particularly common consonant? And should I be trying to get O in there rather than the less frequently used U? I decided to do some computer-aided analysis to find the answer. ...

The Top 5 And Away… by Bob Mortimer As was the case in 2020, my favourite book of the year was an autobiography; this time by national treasure Bob Mortimer. Laugh out loud funny in many places, elsewhere this is tinged with melancholy and the realisation that, for all his on-screen tomfoolery, Mortimer is an incredibly shy individual. Touching, contemplative, warm and kind throughout, there is plenty of food for thought here regarding how we ought to live our lives and interact with those around us. I heartily recommend the audiobook, narrated by the great man himself. ...

I’m on a break between contracts this week, so decided to make the most of the good weather and headed into the Peak District to revisit Stanage Edge for the first time since 2000. Unlike my last visit twenty years ago, there were no ropes or belays involved this time. Instead my Mum and I had a leisurely wander in the blistering July sunshine up part of the Long Causeway, before taking some snapshots at the latest version of the historic Stanage Pole. ...

My daughter Isla pronounced our April walk up Pen-y-Ghent to have been “a bit boring”. Apparently she enjoyed the scrambling and the views but not the lengthy slog. Fair enough. So, looking for something more interesting for our next Dad and Daughter trip into the hills, I armed myself with a copy of “Scrambles In The Dark Peak” by Terry Sleaford and Tom Corker, and today we set off to tackle the first route in the book. ...

A lovely spring Sunday walk up Pen-y-ghent in the Yorkshire Dales with my daughter Isla (her first hike up a proper hill). It was most liberating to get out into the hills after so many months stuck at home or staying local due to the coronavirus pandemic.

So that, then, was 2020. Good riddance. One might imagine that the enforced downtime offered by the pandemic lockdowns would have afforded me the opportunity to read many more books than I did in 2019. But a displeasing proportion of my evenings in 2020 were spent relentlessly doomscrolling Twitter, eager for the latest morsels of information about the pandemic, US election or (sigh) Brexit. Besides, most of my “reading” in 2019 was actually achieved by listening to Audible while commuting or at the gym, two activities which barely featured in my life this year. ...

As the resident geek in our family, it won’t surprise you to hear that I am occasionally approached by Jocelyn and our kids to provide tech support. Sadly, most of these queries are invariably of the “how do I print from my phone” or “the Sky box stopped working” ilk, and rarely trouble my software skills. So it came as a pleasant surprise when I recently encountered a genuine reason to use .NET, APIs and Docker in support of one of Jocelyn’s craft projects. ...

One of the game-changing features of Synology‘s NAS (Network-Attached Storage) devices is their ability to run Docker, the industry-standard containerization technology. This opens up the possibility of running all kinds of applications on the NAS, turning them into home servers with boundless possibilities. One of things I wanted to run on my own Synology NAS is RabbitMQ, the popular open-source message broker. I intend to use this as the heart of a distributed home climate measuring project, with a bunch of low-cost Raspberry Pi devices sending regular sensor readings to a database, or directly to a real-time web application. ...