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  1. Globalization 2.0: Technology-enabled trade that's free, fair and democratic

    Global trade is in trouble. For five straight years, growth in world trade has declined - from 12.4% in 2010 to a mer...

  2. Technology for making agreements

    The internet is now old enough that it’s a multi-generational enterprise. The original vision of a connected world th...

  3. After the smartphone

    Over the last decade, the dominant technology platform has been the smartphone. More than any other device, it has re...

  4. Can we train moral senses with video games?

    A few days ago I pondered this question, in response to the claim that people don’t exercise moral choices very...

  5. When is a problem not a problem?

    In a recent post, Riva-Melissa Tez described Silicon Valley’s “problem problem” - that is, that man...

  6. The social impact of new technologies

    New technologies change the world around us. They do this by obsoleting older technologies and replacing them, or by...

  7. Measuring product team productivity

    One of the hardest things to measure in software development is the productivity of development teams. How, from the...

  8. Further meditations on The DAO

    Since my post on Tuesday, there has been further debate about the future of The DAO, which has helped to clarify the ...

  9. Meditations on The DAO

    It’s a frequent observation that the developments around cryptocurrencies - Bitcoin, Ether and others - make on...

  10. Finite and infinite games for software teams

    In his book of the same title, James P. Carse describes “Finite and Infinite Games”1. A finite game has ...

  11. How should software companies be run?

    Yesterday Nic Ferrier linked to a video of a conference talk by Erik Meijer, in which Erik claimed (amongst other thi...

  12. How to roll out a site migration

    One of the regular challenges for content-managed websites is how to manage the rollout of a new version of your site...

  13. Lean, waste, and golf

    One of the key principles of “lean” philosophy is that we should minimise waste. However, when following...

  14. Drupal on Docker

    At the time of writing, the current version of Docker is 0.3.2 - future versions may change some of the details in th...

  15. Explaining architectural tiers in Drupal

    Like most web frameworks, Drupal has three easily-identifiable architectural layers:Data, including the DB abstractio...

  16. Google: the IE6 of search

    It seems my prediction that 2011 might herald some innovation in the web search field is not as far-fetched as I orig...

  17. What does a Drupal architect do, and what do architects on Drupal projects do?

    Drupal occupies a strange place in the web framework landscape. It’s not a pure framework, like Ruby on Rails,...

  18. Digital Economy Bill: It's the numbers, stupid

    Since my previous post on the Digital Economy Bill, Cory Doctorow has written another post, this time accusing Lib De...

  19. Digital Economy Bill: have I got this right?

    As anyone with an awareness of politics or technology issues will be aware, the British government has recently been ...

  20. Spotify fails the OiNK test

    “OiNK”, for those who don’t know, was a Bittorrent tracker, shut down following police raids in Oct...

  21. Why software developers aren't just engineers

    Recently I wrote about Tom DeMarco’s claim that software engineering is, in some sense, a ‘dead’ di...

  22. Clouds and commodities

    I’ve been following Sean Park’s blog for about a year now, and have been finding his insights to be very ...

  23. What's the point of software engineering?

    Tom DeMarco is one of the founding fathers of modern software engineering. His 1987 book PeopleWare is a highly infl...

  24. Peer-to-peer, private and utility

    This is going to be a slightly more speculative post than is usual. I’d like to explore three distinct models ...

  25. A peer-to-peer future for money and markets?

    As the recession grinds on, the question of “what to do about the banks” remains on the agenda. Today th...

  26. Recent work - Drupal, Drupal, Drupal

    I’ve been pretty busy lately with several projects, most of which are developed on Drupal. One, in particular,...

  27. Why winning is easier than finishing second

    Over the last 18 months at work, I’ve taken on certain duties that, as a software developer, were new to me. W...

  28. Drupal and the usability question

    A few things recently have prompted me to think about the difference between how we pursue the goals of usability and...

  29. Magento shipping module update

    Aside from working with Drupal, another recent development at PRWD has been an update to our Auto-shipping Module for...

  30. Git as a productivity mindhack

    Git is a well-known source code management tool. It enables you to keep versioned copies of your source code, leavin...

  31. Domain-driven design and PHP - Part 1: Introduction

    This is the first post in a series on the subject of Domain-Driven Design and its use in PHP development.If you&rsquo...

  32. Tonight: Presentation to PHPNW

    Tonight I’ll be giving a presentation to PHPNW (event details here) on the subject of Object Relational Mapping...

  33. An amusing bit of spam

    Looking through my email this morning, I encountered a fairly normal spam email:Hi my dear,my name is joy and i am a...

  34. Consorteum

    This post is to celebrate the launch of Consorteum, a collective of small - but expert - tech agencies based in and a...

  35. Using XMind Mind Maps in OmniFocus

    If you’re here for the XMind-OmniFocus import script, click hereI recently purchased a shiny new MacBook, which...

  36. A brief video on VRM

    On March 2nd I attended the PHP UK conference in London, and whilst there I had an interesting chat with Craig Smith ...

  37. What's a consumer?

    At the VRM Hub meeting last Thursday, there was an interesting - although somewhat arcane - discussion about what we ...

  38. VRM and identity

    In this post on VRM, I made a fairly innocuous statement:Consider any local, independent shop - a greengrocer, for ex...

  39. VRM: Exit, Voice and Loyalty

    This post is part of a series:Vendor Relationship ManagementVRM: Rent, don’t buyData EgalitarianismYou may find...

  40. Assorted Links 6th Feb 2009

    Adriana Lukas on her VRM journeySteph Gray examines how co-creation of online public goods can be more effective than...

  41. Data Egalitarianism

    Following on from my recent post about the economics of VRM, particularly as it applies to small and large enterprise...

  42. Assorted Links 30th Jan 2009

    Information sharing orders, the British government’s latest effort at overcoming its own data protection rulesS...

  43. VRM: Rent, don't buy

    Recently I wrote a post outlining some of the basics of vendor relationship management - a new-ish concept in how ind...

  44. Slides from my NUX talk are up

    Last week I gave a talk at the Northern User Experience group on the interaction between usability practitioners and ...

  45. Vendor Relationship Management

    In a previous post I mentioned that, in my view, there’s a lot of nascent innovation out there at present which...

  46. Assorted Links 25th Jan 2009

    William Heath on EU plans to extend copyrightA cynical Will Wilkinson catches the political talking heads using a wor...

  47. New tech horizons for 2009

    This isn’t really a new year predictions post since I’m really a few weeks late for those. As well as th...

  48. Thought for the day: videogames are proper popular culture now

    The original Doom didn’t have much in the way of story. Players took control of a space marine on one of the mo...

  49. Parliamentary Expenses

    At the prompting of mySociety, I’ve written a brief note to my local MP, Beverley Hughes, about the upcoming vo...

  50. Assorted Links 19th Jan 2009

    How to find out how much caffeine is in your decaf coffeeWhy fully-nationalised banks are the only solution to the ba...

  51. Assorted Links 13th Jan 2009

    Slashdot on the increasing use of personality testing in recruitment. A few months ago I made some comments on the r...

  52. Assorted Links 9th Jan 2009

    How focussing on preventing terrorism means that other crimes can escape notice until it’s too lateHow the loss...

  53. Announcing: Wisdom Hive

    Just a brief note to announce the public beginning of the Wisdom Hive project. It’s a project to create a next...

  54. ThoughtWorks event on usability and agile tonight

    Just a quick note for anyone in the Manchester area - tonight there is an event on at the Kilburn Building featuring ...

  55. UCD and Agile

    I’ve got a new post up on the PRWD Blog: User-Centered Design and Agile Development.

  56. IT Recruitment: The spam approach

    Most IT recruitment (the area I mention simply because it’s the one that I have the most direct experience of) ...

  57. Massive free educational resource from the OU

    I’ve recently been considering taking some extra qualifications, and one of my options is the Open University, ...

  58. History of a programmer

    Reading a recent piece on Slashdot about the BBC Micro set off a wave of nostalgia which got me thinking about just h...

  59. Affiliates and crowd marketing

    In this post I hope to explore an idea which has formed a major part of the sales strategy for some of the internet&r...

  60. Semantic web: is it the big thing yet?

    The ’semantic web’ is not a new idea. In fact, the idea has been around almost as long as the web itself...

  61. Move along people, nothing to see here

    At some unspecified future date, this site will have actual content on it. Until then, this is all that you get.