Peter Cresswell

JetBrains has recently introduced a new font called Mono and I love it. It’s intelligent in its considerations (ILlo0O all look distinctly different) and its ligatures are perfect for developers (see -> or ### for examples). Just for fun, I’ve switched my entire blog over to using it. Overkill? You bet. But why not show it off. If you’re writing code, I strongly encourage you to have a look. Read more from JetBrains.

At DoctorCare we’re a believer in the simplicity and value of continuous delivery. We try and avoid long lived branches. All pull requests go to master and master always ships. In fact, there’s no way not to ship master once a PR is merged (outside of stopping the build mind you). For the most part, we’re OK at this. Not great. But ok. We’re running a django application using Bitbucket Pipelines for deployments into AWS Beanstalk with a Postgresql RDS backend. That’s a pretty vanilla deployment if ever there was one and we’re happy to keep it simple.

A year ago, the software team at DoctorCare was a team of one. Just me. Since then, I have added two developers to the team, both junior. In previous positions, I’ve lead teams of up to 20 developers but in the past 5 years or so of working as a contractor and, in the past year, as a full time employee again, I haven’t had to play the team lead role. With this new growth of the team, I’m back to leading developers again.

If you’re really interested in getting my attention, the phrase “Do the exact opposite” is a good place to start. Now it’s not just enough to say it. There needs to be a lot to back up that statement. But on the rare occasions when there actually is great support for it, that sentence has led me down some really incredible paths. The most recent path has led me to a complete rethink of everything I know about fitness. And in this case, it wasn’t a person that told me I was doing everything backwards. It was a book.

I went to An Evening with Vitalik which sounds a like a cheap 1990s porno or something if we’re being honest instead of what it really was; a basic series of speakers topped off with a rundown of what is crypto-economics given by Vitalik himself. The room was reasonably full - perhaps some 300 or so people were there. It was impossible not to notice the lack of women in the room. If there is a lack of women in technology and coding, there appears to be an extreme lack of women in the crypto/ethereum space. That’s a real shame.