JW.PE

Articles on software engineering, engineering management, and the outdoors by Jon Evans.

I read In Ascension in March 2024, and at the time I wrote down quite a few thoughts about the book because I enjoyed it so much. I'm now revisiting my notes to attempt to turn them into a coherent review of the book. Note: I've tried to keep the review section fairly spoiler-free, but there is some discussion of the pacing and characterisation. The subsequent two sections - questions and theories…

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A key factor in your ability to successfully grow an engineering team is your capacity for self-development. Over the course of scaling from zero to a team of double figures, your responsibilities and priorities will change dramatically. This may feel uncomfortable, as the skills that make you effective in your role as the sole engineer on the team will only be marginally helpful in managing a…

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One of the few highlights of my 2020 was walking. Since I've lived in Bristol, I've wanted to make more of an effort to explore the beautiful local countryside. This was always something that fell by the wayside in favour of easier, lazier activities. With the onset of the pandemic, though, options for things to do outside the house dwindled. Fortunately, during the first lockdown my girlfriend…

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On Friday I finished off the initial implementation of obtaining an OAuth token from GitHub. Their documentation makes it pretty straightforward, but for anyone unfamiliar with the OAuth2 flow, it goes a little something like this: The application generates an authentication URL for GitHub based on several parameters including the CLIENT_ID (obtained from the OAuth application on GitHub's side…

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It's been a long time since I've written anything on this blog, and I have a lot of ground to cover. Since I last updated, I've spent 18 months in America, worked on some amazing projects and learned an enormous amount. I'm hoping to talk a bit more about some of the technical concepts I've had the chance to explore in subsequent posts. However, for the moment, I just want to address my short…

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