Journal
My Coaching Philosophy
Published 8 Sept 2022
What motivates me to be a coach? The simple answer is that I enjoy helping others to realise their potential. In my experience if you scratch beneath the surface of any human being, you'll find a huge reservoir of untapped capabilities. Our brains are amazing but the way they evolved can cause us to get in our own way, to miss opportunities and focus on the wrong things.
Finding a framework for powerful coaching questions
Published 1 Aug 2021
The focus of transformational coaching is to help our coachees achieve a shift in their thinking and behaviour. We aim to do this by asking powerful or insightful questions, seeking to raise awareness, to uncover the assumptions that are limiting their performance. How can Tomm's framework from family therapy help?
Development Is Complex, Not Complicated
Published 21 Nov 2020
Understanding the difference in meaning between complex and complicated puts you in the right mindset to succeed in your development practice. The difference is significant, and failure to understand it is at the heart of many unsuccessful projects. I have found that staying "complexity conscious" has helped guide my decision making and avoids an over reliance on rules and bureaucracy.
Using Fragments For Components With Gatsby And Kontent
Published 18 Nov 2020
The use of GraphQL in Gatsby brings many advantages, but it can lead to duplication of query fields across pages and templates. This is a quick guide on a pattern for using fragments inside your React components to avoid duplication.
Constrained Open Generics and Dependency Injection
Published 15 Oct 2020
Jimmy Bogard, author of those stalwart NuGet packages Automapper and MediatR, recently blogged about an upcoming change that he championed in the behaviour of the .NET Core Dependency Injection container. The change related to constrained open generics, a pattern that I had not even considered, which opens up some interesting possibilities.
Goldilocks abstraction for maintainable code
Published 30 Sept 2020
Keeping code DRY is a good thing, but doing so with clever abstractions can result in complexity that reduces clarity, making the code harder to maintain. I think there is a Goldilocks zone for abstraction, just enough to avoid code duplication, but not so much as to create overly complex code that is hard to understand and reason about.
Why email is killing your productivity and how to fix it
Published 4 Sept 2020
Most businesses would be more productive if they did not use email for internal communication. I don't mean "used email less", I mean a total cessation. Why is email so bad? How can you work effectively without it in the "new normal" of remote working?
How To Render Rich Text Content From Kentico Kontent In Gatsby
Published 17 Jun 2020
This is a quick start guide explaining how you render rich text content from Kentico Kontent in Gatsby. All of the information on how to do this is available via the Gatsby Kontent Components GitHub page, but you have to dive into the linked article by Richard Shackleton and piece everything together.