As the Chair of the Board at ScotlandIS I am tasked with our annual address. As the content has generated a lot of comment I wanted to post it here to reach a wider audience. Feel free to get in touch to discuss any of these thoughts further – I love to hear how different businesses are finding the Scottish technology ecosystem. ScotSoft Address [Evening … Continue reading ScotSoft 2025 Dinner Address
Configuring text size and the preference of light mode / dark mode is pretty much universal – even Microsoft Windows has added support for this at some level. It’s been baked into most mobile systems for many years, and Linux for over a decade. And yet we are still writing emails using HTML formatting as though how we (the sender) know best how the recipient … Continue reading Don’t control my font size
Last week I had the pleasure of being invited to the OpenUK awards ceremony. It was originally planned as a big night out in London where like-minded open source advocates and community members could get together, chat about the latest tech or trends and meet new friends. Due to the current pandemic situation, however, they moved it online. Initially I was a little apprehensive as … Continue reading OpenUK Awards: A great night in and a wonderful trophy!
Today I posted a reflection on 2019 for the Fyne project – it’s been a very busy year indeed. We are celebrating 9 releases (3 major), 37 contributors, 7300 stargazers on GitHub and a conference live streamed on YouTube – to read more head to the Fyne blog. It clearly would not be possible without the fantastic contributions of the community – developers, designers, testers … Continue reading Looking toward a Fyne 2020
Have you heard about the new GitHub Sponsors programme? The great people at GitHub have built a platform to help get open source developers paid for the great work they do. Yup, it’s a great idea – one that I had considered exploring before but clearly they have the resources and expertise to do it better – and thankfully they have done. The really exciting … Continue reading Accepted to GitHub Sponsors
Although it feels like only yesterday I realised this week that I moved out of CodeBase pretty much a year ago. In that time I have missed the community spirit and light-hearted competitiveness of the various individuals and teams working to build the next big thing. Whilst I have enjoyed my time working on various coding contracts and technical leadership consultancy placements (most recently through … Continue reading Back home at CodeBase
One of my favourite topics is startups – discussions about the benefits of young companies and how innovative workspaces can be a boon to productivity and healthy work life balance. It would be remiss of me, however, to imply that it is always great. There is a lot of hard work involved of course but it is also possible to have negative workplaces amongst all … Continue reading The wrong company can seriously damage your health
At the ScotlandISDeveloper Conference and Business Forum this year we were treated to a fantastic after dinner close by Sir Frank Dick. As well as amusing and thought provoking anecdotes he had a lot of motivational points that rallied the room to be confident and make the change we want to see in the world. As I think about my next Business potentially being global … Continue reading Tackle the big problems
It’s been over a year since we sold Kotikan to FanDuel – it was an emotional journey to move on from what we had spent so many years building. And working in a team with so many great people too. I’m glad that most of my colleagues are still working at FanDuel – they even won another Webby Award this year! But life moves on. Even after leaving FanDuel … Continue reading One final achievement for Kotikan
It is a cognitive and emotional relief to immerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge. Ryan Avent – https://www.1843magazine.com/features/why-do-we-work-so-hard Continue reading Why do we work so hard?
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