(Note: the code snippets do not look great in this article. I’m publishing for now because I want to get the content out. I plan to adjust the styling later) In Figure 1 below, you will see a photo of a “mobile” thin-client version of my personalized development environment. Look closely. You will see it is running on an iPad. I have found the iPad to be pretty good for on-the-go development because a) it is light b) has long battery life c) has a great screen d) is cheaper than a typical developer-spec laptop and e) there are no secrets or code are stored locally presenting less of a security headache if the device is lost or stolen.

In this series, I’d like to share my experiences of over 20+ years of architecting large complex enterprise systems, products and services. If you are involved in any kind of software development endeavor in whatever role, hopefully you find something of value in this series. The first question you may immediately ask is, if some of these guidelines are borne from experiences from years ago, surely they are out of date?

In July 2023, I knocked up a simple AI chatbot using the open source Llama model from Meta. I coded it up from scratch using LangChain. It had the ability to build a vector store from your own proprietary or sensitive documents, enabling you to chat “over them”, without risking un-intentional disclosure. It ran reasonably ok, using a quantized version of Llama, but the main selling point was the complete privacy and zero subscription costs.

Desktop computers typically have a power-save mode which puts them in a suspended state after a period of inactivity. This is a great feature as it helps to save power and prolongs the life of the hardware. In the case of a laptop, it helps to preserve battery life too. Waking the machine typically involves either pressing the keys on the keyboard or moving the mouse. This is fine, but what if you are not close by and you want to wake your machine?

After getting swept up in the great tech layoff of ‘23 and ‘24, I found myself with time on my hands. With no teams to lead, reports to write, plans to create, meetings to attend, and politics to navigate, I quickly snapped back to my default self. That is full on nerd, or as my mum used to say when I would spend hours hacking my little Sinclair ZX Spectrum, “He’s playing on the computer”.

After over a decade working AWS, during my “sabbatical” I’ve had the opportunity to go multi-cloud and play around with Azure and Google Cloud. I’ve built 3 websites in recent months - all containerized, stateless and static. These are simple workloads, and due to the use of containers (and their stateless nature), they are highly portable. This has provided me the opportunity to do some comparisons. I’m cheap and so I optimized their deployment for cost trying to make them as cheap as possible (I’ve succeeded).

Two months ago, I decided I wanted to build a couple of websites. For one of the websites, I wanted a place where I could publish my articles. That particularly website is called circleinaspiral.com. Maybe it is where you are reading this articile right now. This particular article is not about circleinaspiral.com. Instead, it is for a website to be used to document a recent house remodel my wife and I undertook during 2023.

Nothing to do whatsoever with the content — just a nice photo to bring joy to your day When evaluating candidates [¹], I urge you to look beyond the skills of the candidate. Of course, skills are an important consideration, but know that skills can be learned and the skills you need today may not be the skills you need tomorrow. Ask yourself, are you looking to release a product?

Strelley Hall — my first place of work (photo sourced from Flickr) The year was 1989. I was a nerdy awkward teenager about to enter the workforce. My mum found the advert in the jobs section of the Nottingham Evening Post. She was always very supportive in my interest towards computers since she bought my first computer [¹] a few years earlier. She had also seen that any job involving computers tended to be well-paid.

What’s hiding in the deep? You are probably coding in JavaScript or Python. That’s cool. I do too (Python). Just know that you are perched high on top of two huge highly evolved technology stacks. The software stack and the network stack. The best advice I can offer you is to consider going deep into both of these stacks. When you come back to the surface, you will be a better developer for it.