It’s frustrating when reports like this cite the “highly interoperable nature” of commercial software as a given. Interoperability doesn’t mean “everything in one place”—it means the opposite. But redefining it allows vendors to present a magical solution.
corollary: if you run an open source library with any users at all, you are now in a vulnerability-finding arms race with those who will mechanically find and exploit security issues in your code… and embarrassingly, any software that depends on it
new post on translation, holding different versions of reality, and living between worlds
mikegallagher.org/posts/of-med...
please sign me up!
Noting that NHS England currently has job ads out for a CDIO and CDAO (this is in addition to the Department of Health and Social Care CDO):
findajob.dwp.gov.uk/details/1794...
findajob.dwp.gov.uk/details/1794...
There's a month to apply.
“bottlenecks are not natural obstacles – they are, in most cases, the consequence of increasing production” 💎
speculative fiction in CHANGELOGs is the genre I didn't know I needed!
Curious as to how the £4,166,666.67 figure was arrived at—a clean two thirds of £6.25m. I wonder what cost £6.25m of which this was considered 2/3 of the work?
aye, captain!
“We continue to immediately ban and publicly ridicule everyone who submits AI slop to the project.”
So it looks like the government is announcing a National Police Service. Again.
It's one of those ideas that seems perfect from the outside, but yet we never seem to be able to get right.
It got my brain whirring, so I wrote up some reflections.
andreasthinks.me/posts/reflec...
#Policing #uk
How many govt services end up crocked, despite the efforts of skilled teams. (Policy and delivery being treated as separate. Shared platform cosplay. Leaders rotating off every 2yrs.) medium.com/@veroj/inter...
Wrote about my first 7 months transforming the technology underpinning the national breast screening programme: lizlutgendorff.substack.com/p/lessons-le...
*Delighted* by number 6!
My sense is that the Test and Learn movement in the public sector anchors much more on “build-and-test” than “describe-and-defend” as this essay sets them out… possibly to its detriment?
i agree! interesting that software formalises the "doctrine" part into a job role whilst everyone else has the job of balancing doctrine and context all day, decision by decision
“You want your structural engineers to be drawing, not laying bricks, after all. I don’t know if structural engineering works like this, but software engineering doesn’t. In practice, architecture advice often has to be ignored by the people on the ground.”
www.seangoedecke.com/you-cant-des...
thank you!
thanks! i might!
thank you! def worth checking out Le Suite—bold and maybe overambitious, but v interesting to see it happening
My 2025 #yearnote as—sorry!—a listicle.
mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/2025/
I think the real lesson to draw from Palantir's many contracts is that government has on the whole so successfully driven away talent that those who show up capable and incentivised to engage with the real problems seem like manna from heaven—& worth the ££££ and the lock-in. We should look to that!
Whereas a module that Palantir chooses to extract and add to their platform is just proprietary software. It's clever: they've harnessed the network effects of a open-source like ecosystem with a completely closed commercial model. Good business! And walled gardens surely have advantages.
That irreducible difference is the space where the design system and friends enable us to play very productively, and those assets are ours.
These are imperfect means to capture "solutions". But there's an irreducible difference between being solving one problem and having a generic solution to more than one—indeed the latter makes for the bad old consultancy model ZS contrasts unfavourably with Palantir's.
ZS observes that for "indie consultants" "there’s no one extracting the patterns. The knowledge compounds in their heads... but it doesn’t get productised. It doesn’t create leverage." We do have that though: open source, the design system, the service manual.
I disagree with the conclusions of this excellent, reasonable article by @zoescaman.bsky.social zoescaman.substack.com/p/the-palant...
One of the many joys of using AI for programming is the creation of huge PRs on complex topics that the authors barely understand, but still suggest "because they work". Here's a great example from #OCaml github.com/ocaml/ocaml/...
Kudos to OCaml's maintainers for handling this so gracefully.
This really resonates. Meetings are the synchronisation penalty public servants pay for an overwhelmingly synchronous, distributed system of management. The “meeting culture” is not optional—it expresses a cultural void where autonomy can’t flourish.
