Evening Photo Walk

I was inspired to get out and take some photos in the crisp evening air of Copenhagen in December. Just days away from the winter solstice, it is dark by 3.30pm, and by 10pm when I took to the streets, it is pitch black. Small groups of locals gathered on benches and corners holding tins …

Epics: the raw materials for scaled agile

The various scaled agile frameworks make use of some common building blocks which many practitioners will be familiar with. Stories are often the most familiar, as they are the raw material of the SCRUM and Kanban practices which have been applied at the team/squad level for many years, particularly in technical teams. However, in the …

On excessive digital consumption

Many people today are talking about how uncomfortable they feel about their dependence on devices, and more specifically the content they consume via their devices. Whilst this theme is certainly well established, I have observed very few experimenting with ways of adapting to this trend in a positive manner. What is interesting is how, in …

Saying goodbye to Northcote Books

Several years ago I was very lucky to become involved in a local initiative in Clapham, London, to establish a community bookshop. The initiative was a response to the closing of the existing local bookshop along with the persistent threat of closure which haunted the local library. Our vision was one of community building, with …

Bexhill Skate Park Community Campaign

The skate park at Bexhill leisure centre, now earmarked for demolition, has an incredibly passionate and vibrant community of riders and skaters. The skate park is in desperate need of renovation – several accidents and near misses due to the state of the ramps and concrete occurred during the shooting of these photos. And with …

Evolving Specialised Species in Diverse Simulated Ecologies using a Subsumption Architecture

Evolving Specialised Species in Diverse Simulated Ecologies using a Subsumption ArchitectureDownload Back in 2006, three years in to my degree in “computer systems and software engineering” at the University of York, I embarked on my Masters project. The ambition was quite clear – to use a complementary suite of AI algorithms to simulate speciation. The …

Vote with your head and your heart

The Tories very deliberately pitch themselves as the thinking voter’s party. The party of the head, not the heart. So why is it that many indicators suggest that those who are proactively engaging in the democratic process – with their heads, not their hearts – lean left? A fantastic case in point is this screenshot from the …