Late in 2018, our thoughts turned to what we'd do to celebrate the end of 2018. Having had a couple of recent New Years Eve's wiped out through illness, myself and Jo were ready to do a little more for the upcoming New Year celebrations. Rather than spend time in the UK, we decided to … Continue reading Iceland – December 2018 →

Late in March 2018 I decided to delete my Facebook account. Scheduled deletion of my Facebook account. I'd recently removed it from my phone and disabled my account. #DeleteFacebook— Steve Bennett 💬 (@stevebennett) March 20, 2018 This isn't the first time I'd decided to do this. In 2014, as Facebook turned 10, I decided to … Continue reading Removing Facebook (again) →

I've been a SquareSpace customer for a couple of years now, having decided to restart my blogging efforts. I initially chose SquareSpace as I wanted a simple, hosted option so that I could concentrate on writing rather than configuring web servers. I liked the ease with which I could get started with SquareSpace, and I … Continue reading Moving my site to WordPress →

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently reworking our career paths. Our current documents are heavily based on the work by Radford, which defines 6 levels for each job family. Whilst our career path was very well defined and comprehensive, we are finding that the documentation is a little incomprehensible and causes difficulty … Continue reading Career Paths and Circles →

I believe that one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is to own your mistakes. Nobody is perfect, and therefore it’s inevitable that you will make mistakes. Often, holding a leadership or management position means that these mistakes are magnified and have a impact on many more people. So why … Continue reading Owning your mistakes →

Choosing the “best tool for the job” is a mantra that many software engineers repeat when asked to explain their choice of tool, language or framework. In some cases, this choice is right, however far too many times in my career I’ve seen “best tool for the job” loosely translate to whatever was top of … Continue reading The Power of Sensible Defaults →

I was fortunate enough to spend the last couple of days at Lead Developer 2017 in London. The conference has been described as a leadership and management conference dressed up as a technical conference. It’s one of my “must-attend” conferences of the year. There were some clear themes from the talks this year, with perhaps … Continue reading Lead Dev London 2017 Field Report →

Part of the role of an Engineering Manager is to help others to achieve their career aspirations. However, it's not always easy for people to articulate the direction they hope their career will take them. For some, it can be difficult to describe their ideal future role, or to answer that "where will you be … Continue reading Career Development Planning Questions →