NOTE: This post was originally published in an older version of the blog. While all efforts were made in the migration to ensure the links still work and other visual elements communicate the intended meaning, some issues may remain. If you identify any, please drop me a note and I'll get it fixed asap.
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Introduction

February 24, 2019

Blog, Engineering Philosophy

Hi, welcome to my blog - it's a place for me to share my experiences co-founding and helping grow two technology businesses to scale. I'm a developer at heart so it will mostly be about the tech, but it will also be about the intersection of technology, business, leadership, society and ethics.

Along the way, I hope to explore the history of our discipline. Over the years I've noticed how frequently the solution to a problem I was facing had been developed many years before. So began my fascination with the trajectory of ideas: how they are shared, diluted, abandoned, and reinvented, each time with a new spin in a new context.

About the Name

For a while I was calling this site (and my coaching/advisory business) "Dev Cycles". Although I no longer use that branding, this is an explanation of the name, as I still find it interesting! Dev Cycles is a reference to the software development life-cycle, which describes a general process of software development from concept to outcome.

The banner image above is tangentially related - it's a slice from a diagram of epicycles in the Geocentric model - an ancient idea in the history of astronomy (which turned out to be very wrong!) trying to explain what was at the time inexplicable - the motion of the planets and stars.

The Geocentric Model

Apart from the name association, the metaphor continues:

  1. The epicycles themselves relate to the cyclical nature of technology trends - fads come and go like dancing planets.
  2. I hope to use this blog to tell stories about the evolution of ideas, and the journey from epicycles to the general theory of relativity is surely a gold standard in the field!
  3. I have often felt like I was trying to solve a technical challenge with a conceptual framework that was as ill-equipped to understand the work ahead of me as epicycles were to explain the motion of the heavens.

Image: Cassini_apparent.jpg by James Ferguson (1710-1776), based on similar diagrams by Giovanni Cassini (1625-1712) and Dr Roger Long (1680-1770); engraved for the Encyclopaedia by Andrew Bell. - Encyclopaedia Britannica (1st Edition, 1771; facsimile reprint 1971), Volume 1, Fig. 2 of Plate XL facing page 449. Sourced from wikipedia.

Join the Conversation

An aspiration of this blog is to explore a connection with the origins of ideas, so I value any personal stories and experiences that add flavour and context.

Please join the conversation and leave a comment - a critique, an observation, or a memory of your own experiences - all welcome!