- AI
- ambiguity
- APIs
- architecture
- augmented reality
- books
- bureaucracy
- career
- change
- Christmas
- cloud
- collaboration
- communication
- complexity
- computer history
- corporate life
- data
- decisions
- delivery
- devops
- end user tools
- ethics
- failure
- fear
- fundamentals
- gaming
- government
- halloween
- history
- humans
- hype
- identity
- infrastructure
- innovation
- language
- leadership
- learning
- legacy
- management
- measurement
- mental health
- money
- networking
- New Year
- operations
- philosophy
- physics
- platforms
- prediction
- process
- procurement
- programming
- quantum
- reliability
- resilience
- risk
- robotics
- science
- science fiction
- security
- shadow IT
- space
- standards
- strategy
- talent
- teams
- technical debt
- technology advocacy
- testing
- thinking
- transformation
- TV
- virtues
- vision
- writing
Uncertainty: the final frontier
When our schedules and streaming services are full of Star Trek content (at the last count, thirteen series and fourteen films), it seems hard to remember that the series was once a lonely, experimental long shot: the first regular science fiction TV series with recurring characters and themes, squarely aimed at adults.
Prompted by watching the (excellent) series Strange New Worlds, I tracked down a print copy of the book The Making of Star Trek, published in 1968, between the second and third season of the original series, when it was on the brink of cancellation. If you can put aside some of the 1960s-era attitudes (despite the generally progressive tone of Star Trek, there are some paragraphs that wouldn’t make it into a 2026 edition), it’s a fascinating overview of television production at the time, and of the challenges of getting studios and networks to try something new (and expensive).
How augmented is your reality?
In the Battlestar Galactica reboot series, the Cylon character Brother Cavil laments that, when he saw a supernova, ‘you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air . . .’ He goes on to demand, ‘I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter!’ In the story, Cavil is a synthetic being but, rather than the gleaming robot form of the Cylons from the original film and TV series, he inhabits an organic human body, subject to humanity’s frailties and constraints.
Is your frontend fixation robbing your sponsors of agency and accountability?
Text scrolls across the screen. Lights flash and patterns whirl. Images of faces flicker past, overlaid with lines and symbols. The frantic activity slows and settles. One face remains. PERFECT MATCH.
I was watching yet another new police procedural drama. And I was having the same reaction that I always have when they show the user interface for the big computer system that takes three pieces of data and a blurry image, and finds one suspect amongst millions. It doesn’t work that way.
I’m not an expert in police systems or forensic systems, but I know that anyone building any systems has limited time and resources, and they avoid spending those resources on things that aren't necessary. And a user interface that attempts to show all the inner workings of the system isn’t necessary: if you’re lucky, you’ll get a progress bar, a buffering symbol or a spinning ball.
Make code make sense
Code is a maze. If you don’t leave breadcrumbs, you will get lost.
Most professionals cringe at how their work is portrayed on film and TV. Technology is no different. Hackers who growl, ‘I’m in,’ after bashing away furiously on a keyboard. Complex 3D graphics that supposedly represent a file system. Giant ‘downloading’ progress bars that conveniently fill just before the hero needs to snatch the drive from the unsecured USB port.
But the most egregious portrayal may be the least obtrusive: it happens when the heroes get their hands on a piece of code that is essential to defuse the bomb, or expose the villain, or unlock the door to the cell, or whatever is needed to move the plot along. The code scrolls up the screen, the hacker character squints and scowls at it, then frowns and starts typing. (Occasionally there is a variant, where the hacker stares at the code, wide-eyed, and says something like, ‘It’s beautiful . . . so elegant.’ Spoiler alert for non-programmers: I do not believe that anybody has ever said these words about another person’s code.)
Is there a human shaped hole in your technology plans?
If you’ve been watching The Last of Us then one of the things you will have noticed (alongside the great acting and story) is the eerie feeling of a human world with no humans: an empty world except for nature, a few survivors and, of course, the infected. I sometimes get that same eerie feeling when looking at plans for technology change: where are all the humans?
This is strange, because humans have been at the heart of new movements in the ways we build and run technology for decades.
The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001. Almost all of its 73 words (including the title) concern people, behaviour and communication rather than technology and tools. (Indeed, people and behaviour over technology and tools could almost be a line from the Agile Manifesto.)
The first DevOps days conference was held in 2009. You can still go and read the program (although if you try to follow the links to other sites in the reactions section, you get a great demonstration of link rot). While a lot of the agenda was clearly quite technical, much of it was focused on people, behaviours and communication. Do user stories really help express non-functional requirements? What does automation mean for sysadmins and development teams? How can practices followed by software developers be applied to operations?
Finding wisdom in unexpected places
In strange and uncertain times, it helps to find wisdom, whatever the source.
I don’t mind admitting that, even though I am privileged to be healthy, housed and in work, I find it challenging to work in a world where we can’t meet each other in person, where I sit in the same room every day, and those days blur into a seamless stream.
In theory, as I no longer have to take the time to travel home on a train (or even a plane), I should end each day with the extra energy to put that lockdown time to productive use. In practice, I find that, most evenings, I don’t have the energy to do much more than watch TV. I suspect that I am not alone.