Partly-retired software engineer living in Leeds. Experience in Java, JavaScript, PHP, custom DSLs and software/hardware integration. Trading as Computec Consulting.

I am particularly interested in the way software projects so often fail to deliver on time, do what was required or collapse into unrecoverable heaps. 2018 was the 50th anniversary of "The Software Crisis", which first identified this problem, and yet in spite of massive changes and improvements to both hardware and software the same failures keep repeating. I believe the cause is the way complexity is embraced as a virtue instead of being rejected as a vice.

"It's very easy to make things complex, but very hard to make them simple."

I believe in the power of natural language to express the purpose of a computer program in a way that can be understood by non-programmers as well as specialists. The more eyeballs there are on code the more reliable it will be and the closer it will match its aims. If computers are as smart as they are often claimed to be it's high time they are made to understand what we say, rather than forcing us to adapt to how they think.