This is the conversation I held with Google Bard to test out its ability to provide information from the internet. If they can get this right, this ability opens up tons of interesting use cases around website scraping, so I was naturally interested in it. At first the response seemed…

TLDR: it was the Russians — Let’s take a look at who blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine during the early hours of 6th June 2023. Both the Ukrainians and the Russians deny it, so let’s apply some common sense to the question. Who had reasons to do it? Um, that would be the…

The fall of Przemyśl, an Austro-Hungarian fortress town, was a huge loss for the Austro-Hungarian empire. — The fortress town was finally taken by the Russians after two drawn out sieges that cost them over 100,000 casualties. But first, a quick geography lesson for those you with a knowledge of eastern European geography like mine; the town of Przemyśl is in modern day Poland, on the border…

The canal looks cold, muddy, uninviting. It’s cold, with a chill easterly wind that tugs insistently at the post-industrial landscape. I’m struck by the absence of life. Just a few trees, including a magnificent Weeping Willow, trailing its branches a uniform handspan above the rippled water. The canal in winter…

Building software is hard — Many people say that building software should be like building houses and wonder why so much effort is needed to build working products. Fundamentally, building software is different from construction as we’re hardly ever building a repeatable product. As such we need to use different techniques to help us navigate…

The “forces” you need to understand to have a profitable business. In this article I’m going to look at Professor Michael E. Porter’s strategy model that provides a way of examining the pressures that influence and constrain a company’s strategy. …

Your organisation is GDPR compliant, but how do you stay that way? — It is all too easy to consider compliance with the GDPR as a “one off” project that will complete and then be “done”. Whilst the establishment of the initial baseline of compliance can be treated as a project (and generally was when the regulation was introduced), the compliance position must…

A look at the strange history of Britain’s Blue Peacock atom bomb land mine project from the 1950s. — In the light of developments in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s frequent reminders that he has nukes, we’ll be hearing a lot of how Russia’s doctrine includes the use of tactical nuclear weapons. These are things like nuclear artillery shells, used for limited objectives, such as wiping out an armoured column…

Using the INVEST approach to ensure that your user stories are fit for purpose — The only real test of whether a user story has been written well is whether the development team is able to pull it from the backlog and begin working on it. Helpfully, there’s a well known acronym that allows you to “test” if your user stories are ready. Each letter…