Long ago I lost track of how many conference talks I've given. The first step for most of those was taking a deep breath, logging in to the conference website, and writing a short description about what I would talk about.

The first step on the journey is responding to a call for papers, call for sessions, or call for talks. So, I learned to ignore the fear of rejection, and just throw my idea in the pot. There was so much more to gain from the risk the organisers would say yes, than the risk they would say no.

Hello.  Nothing much to say, but I want to mark the start of another year. 2025. Hello 2025.

The image, is a weird artefact that was generated when scanning some old family photos.  It's a fragment of a larger photo - somehow auto-detected by the scanning software.  It's a snippet of a painting done by my grandmother Ruth Benjamin

She said "A bit of painting, that's all I'm good for," so perhaps that's why I felt urged to save and share this scanning glitch.

What's the difference between a practice, and a method? How do they related to theories and philosophy?

Connie Benn and Joan Benjamin developed the 4 power model in the 1970s whilst working in the Poverty Education centre at the Brotherhood of St Laurence.  I've always found it to be a useful frame of reference when seeking to understand what's going on in teams, projects and organisations.

Once upon a time, in another century, I directed a student theatre production of Romeo and Juliet. A couple of things went very very wrong.  But in the end, they didn't really matter.

Water color painting of the city of melbourne from southbank looking towards flinders street station.
Image gen: https://huggingface.co/spaces/KingNish/Instant-Image 

I have been wondering about doing an experiment for solar powered data centres that automatically transfers workloads around the world to where ever the sun is shining. Could be fun to try!

We talk of "follow the sun support" what about supporting follow the sun hosting?

image: Sol, cafuego, flickr

I just spent way too long looking for this graphic by Dragan Stepanovic

And then found the rest of his blog to be quite excellent too.

Pair to program, mob to learn.

What is value?

What are values?

Why do we focus on value?

Ultimately, in many ways a value is simply a point of measurement. A small stripe on a ruler or thermometer. A price, a temperature, a height, a weight. A value. A number.

But we use the word in other ways too. We talk of values that are not numbers, we use this word to collect concepts that are much harder to measure.