This week I am officially "on retreat". I haven't actually left my house because budget, but what I have done is cancel all meetings, turn off all notifications, and I'm not doing any small admin tasks or replying to messages unless they're urgent. It started because I was getting frustrated about how much time each week was devoted to "business as usual", and how hard it was to find large chunks of focused time for the following activities: Reading in depth articles, watching videos etc...
7 days ago • 2 min read
Matt Squire on stage at Manchester Tech Festival (This is the first post in a series of three - part 2 and part 3 may not be published yet.) I was at the always-informative Manchester Tech Festival the other week, where I saw a great talk by Matt Squire, CTO of Fuzzy Labs, with the title "Are We the Last Programmers? AI and the Future of Code". I’ve started experimenting with using LLMs to help me build software, so I'm particularly interested in this topic. Matt covered several areas in his...
17 days ago • 3 min read
You’re constantly balancing competing demands — supporting your team, meeting delivery expectations, advocating for engineering health, responding to leadership and general admin. The result can be a relentless cycle of context switching, long hours, and the sense that you’re never quite doing enough. You may suffer from irritability, concentration difficulties, or even resentment toward the role you once enjoyed. At the same time, the constant stream of meetings, messages, and tickets in...
22 days ago • 2 min read
Participants in a coding workshop I’ve started experimenting with using LLMs to help me build software. One of the first things I did was to watch the video of Llewellyn Falco’s talk about using process files as blueprints for Agentic AI, from Craft Conference 2025. I learnt a lot from this, and it was a great starting point to get me going with LLMs. In that video, Llewellyn does over an hour of live augmented coding on stage. And one of the first things I noticed was that he uses the LLM...
25 days ago • 5 min read
Clare (me) with Emily Bache and some coding workshop participants So, you’re thinking about using LLMs to help you code? Maybe you’re unsure about the negative impacts - on the planet, on the industry, on education, on your ability to actually code. Honestly, apart from a little fence-sitting handwringing I can’t help you much with that, but recently I decided to sell my soul to the devil and start experimenting with using LLMs to help me build software. And you know what? It’s fascinating,...
29 days ago • 2 min read
On stage at Lead Dev London Never apologise, never explain Right? But argh, it’s so hard when there are so many articles out there like this one, and so many people I know really HATE AI, and sometimes it feels like I’m joining forces with the devil… So I’m going to try and keep all the apologising and explaining limited to this one post, which I’ll link back to from everything else, and then I can move on. I’ve started to explore the use of agentic generative AI* to build software. I was...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Would you like to attend a talk about how to counter the fear of not being technical enough, or how we can stop making each other feel stupid, or how to make the most of diversity in the workplace? Or maybe you'd like to immerse yourself in one of my hands-on workshops... about refactoring skills, or about using TDD to wrangle AI coding (there's more advice here on getting started with LLM-augmented coding), or facilitating mob / ensemble programming, or on how to handle the technical in...
2 months ago • 1 min read
What do you do if there's stuff you don't know? Can you ask questions? What questions should you ask? How should you ask those questions? In an earlier post, I addressed the fear of having colleagues with better technical skills than you. I suggested, "Spend time pairing with [those who know more than you]." And I added, "Handled without apology, this exercise will deepen your team members’ respect for you, rather than the other way around." I promised to explain what I meant in another post....
3 months ago • 3 min read
Oh no! You’ve been given a new team to lead, and they’re working on this horrible legacy code base that everyone hates! I can't make sense of this code... Nobody enjoys working on this code. Team members are going through the motions with no interest in what they do, repeating the same terrible patterns and either counting the days to retirement or actively looking for more exciting work elsewhere. Here are three things you can do to make things better, for yourself and for your team: 1....
4 months ago • 1 min read