Personal

Over the past few months I’ve discussed security with family, colleagues and friends. During these conversations I’ve heard the most bizarre statements, ranging from: “anybody can see my data, I don’t have anything to hide” as an excuse to not install recent updates (that admittedly screwed up the system), to “I use weak passwords and don’t mind if these get hacked” as an excuse to not use a password manager and “I want to be online as little as possible so that I can’t lose anything”. People conveniently forget that there’s a lot more going on and all these statements assume that only large scraping bot networks roam the interwebs and are only interested in seeing the data. ...

For close to a year and a half now, I’ve had the opportunity to be in an architect role. This in itself has been something I’ve been looking forward to for quite a few years now, and I’m very grateful to the people that helped me maneuver into this position. The change to this role went gradually and for quite a while I was still involved in the development effort. This situation has given me a means to reflect on my time as a software developer, and making a case that I don’t want to go back. ...

Ever feel like you're just not listened to. That your warnings fall on deaf ears and the wrong decision is being made. This is something that a lot of developers feel, it's called the Cassandra Syndrome. Unfortunately, it happens to all of us because we're not good at selling our ideas and selling ourselves. We're shrugged off with various reasons. The unfortunate truth is, this is the right call, not because we're wrong. More often than not, we're completely unable to properly reason and sell what we believe. We often claim trust we haven't yet deserved this. Our challenge is to break through this pattern. ...

Close to 10 years ago I found out that I was dyslexic, explaining many of the troubles I've had in school (and subsequently university and work thereafter). These troubles were mostly in the category of "things that are hard to pick up". Over the years I've found a mode for myself to not let it be too much of a handicap. Note that it really is a handicap, it's something that poses (a set of) significant limitations in your day to day work, limitations you can't fix, though you generally can work around them. ...