My six-year-old daughter soldered her first circuit board on a Saturday afternoon in our kitchen. She was crouched over a magnifying lamp, tongue poking out in concentration, melting lead-free solder onto the pins of a resistor. The board she was building was a replica of one of the most consequential machines in computing history: an Enigma cipher machine .…
Priya processes supplier invoices in accounts payable at a mid-sized facilities company, and on a Tuesday morning, in the third hour of a queue of forty-one, she asks the company chatbot to total a payment schedule,…
A commercial lead at a county council sits down on a Monday to buy a case-management tool for adult social care.…
An SBOM is sold to you as a security document. That is the smallest thing it is. The acronym stands for Software Bill of Materials, and the simplest way to picture one is the way CISA describes it : a list of…
For two centuries, every major communication technology has optimized for the same constraint: transmission speed. AI is the first technology that may have solved the wrong problem entirely.…
I have a confession. I grew up in Brighton - England's least religious city - with atheist parents who were, by any reasonable measure, the counterculture.…
My youngest was about three months old when a colleague at a Christmas party asked if she could hold her. I said yes. Of course I said yes.…
On the evening of 26 September 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov sat down for a night shift at a Soviet nuclear early-warning facility called Serpukhov-15, south of Moscow. The system was new.…
Institutional Memory & AI In 1086, William the Conqueror sent his commissioners across England to record every acre of land, every head of livestock, every mill and fishpond in the kingdom.…
In 1997, Steve Jobs sat in a screening room and watched an advertisement he had initially dismissed as "advertising agency shit." The ad, created by TBWA\Chiat\Day , featured Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, and a dozen other…
There is a stretch of road between my house and the school gate where, if the wind is right and the lights are with us, my children and I learn that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.…
I have a confession. I thought I was in the commodity quadrant. I wasn't. I was in genesis.…
I learnt a new concept this week. Or rather, I re-learnt an old one. RSS — Really Simple Syndication — the technology that, in the mid-2000s, was going to democratise how we consumed information on the internet.…
Sometime around 2006, a Microsoft engineer called Bill Baker stood in front of a slide deck about scaling SQL Server and drew a line down the middle.…
I have a confession. For years, I thought the problem with job titles was that they were too narrow.…
I rewatched Night at the Museum recently with my young children. In the first film , three retiring night guards hand Larry Daley a numbered instruction booklet.…
On 30 October 1935, a prototype called the Boeing Model 299 taxied onto the runway at Wright Field, Ohio, and crashed on takeoff. The aircraft was not faulty. The pilot, Major Ployer Peter Hill, was not incompetent.…
I counted them once. Not because I'd set out to count them, but because I was standing at the back of a hotel function room in Reading, holding a coffee that was too hot to drink and too sad to throw away, and I had to…
My grandmother told a story about a woman in her village. The woman was rushing to church, practically running, pushing her bicycle along beside her.…
I was going to write this article because I thought I knew all there was to know about the Dunning-Kruger effect.…
In the spring of 1913, inside a brick cathedral on the edge of Detroit, William B.…
I owe someone a credit. I owe him more than a credit, actually — I owe him a lineage.…
I got into skydiving to impress girls at parties. I am not going to dress that up.…
We've commoditised innovation. Not the ideas — you can't commoditise human creativity.…
In 1858, the New York Times ran a piece about the transatlantic telegraph that should be tattooed on the forehead of every technologist alive today.…
I learnt something unexpected last year while watching a local authority content editor at work.…
In 1945, Vannevar Bush published an essay called As We May Think in The Atlantic. In it, he described a hypothetical device called the Memex — a desk-sized machine that could store an entire library and, crucially,…
I learnt this week that the very first commit to a side project of mine was made at twenty to one in the morning on a Saturday in October 2018.…
There is a moment in every organisation's cloud journey where someone asks a question that sounds simple and turns out to be anything but: "How much will this cost?" Black Friday game start screen I have watched senior…
I spent four days last week trying to teach a computer to recognise British Sign Language. I use the word "trying" deliberately.…