Chris Oldwood
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chrisoldwood.bsky.social
Chris Oldwood
@chrisoldwood.bsky.social
290 followers 180 following 900 posts
skeet = reinterpret_cast(life)
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#Introduction

@chrisoldwood = IT ∩ Dad Jokes

Author of far more than 97 puns every programmer should know…

Sets from Lightning talks:

[2016] Continuous Delivery & Becoming a Bitter Programmer
chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2016/04/stan...

[2017] Wit Limits
chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2017/12/wit-...
Saving "Daylight"...

████████████ 100%
When you write code in ALL CAPS, it’s like shouting, so presumably has a high volume, unlike lowers caps which is more quiet. So SQL has a higher volume on average than, say, C++ :o).
Happy (belated) Mean Girls Day :o).
Back in 2018 we had the FFS Tech Conference where every talk started “FFS…”. If the current state of the industry doesn’t demand another one then I don’t know does 🤷‍♂️.

ffstechconf.org
FFS Tech Conference
The Tech Conference that only has sessions entitled “FFS …”. Follow @FFSTechConf on Twitter. To be held on 19th September, 2018 in City of London, UK
ffstechconf.org
Real infrastructure level chaos engineering :o).
It might be interesting to disconnect the transatlantic cable every once in a while, too.
Reposted by Chris Oldwood
Full marks to the BBC weather site for correctly showing the repetition of 1am in the UK this weekend. (Hopefully most other weather sites get this right too...)
The problem with Dynamo DB is that the lights go out whenever Amazon stops peddling it…
Reposted by Chris Oldwood
Decades of internet innovation have resulted in the pinnacle of human achievement - Firefox reader mode.

Rendering simple black text on a white background.

They could never have imagined this in the 90s.
The expression “many hands make light work” stems from a time when horses were used to assist with farming. Horses are measured in hands, and so the bigger the horse the more “hands” it contributed to the workload and the faster it got done.

#TrainingDataPoison :P
Reposted by Chris Oldwood
spotted in the wild!! go matty! 🙌

recently shipped a v2 of this sticker, which i like even better:
World is to WorldSeries, as Java is to JavaScript…

:P
IMHO the build & test pipeline should essentially be a by-product of the way you work in a sandbox on your local machine. Starting each change with a clean slate benefits both local and CI flows.

[2014] Building the Pipeline - Process Led or Product Led?
chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2014/10/buil...
Building the Pipeline - Process Led or Product Led?
Tales of a computer programmer.
chrisoldwood.blogspot.com
Currently writing a book about the life of a sysadmin supporting a service hosted in AWS Ireland. Working title is All Quiet on the Eu-West-1 Front...
Thinking of calling my new AI tool “Atom”, because it makes up everything…
I think there is an entire series waiting to unfold here with “Matcha Pitcher” a solid follow-up :o).
Reposted by Chris Oldwood
Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!
The Majority AI View - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
anildash.com
Despite being almost 20 years old, and many of the tools pretty out-of-date, there was still a lot of good stuff in here as the concepts, unsurprisingly, have stood the test of time. Worth it for the Pac-Man story alone :o).
A.I.: Auto-Incomplete

Less “done, done”, and more “un-done”.

:P
Looks like the old dial-up ISP is being run out of somebody’s garage these days :o).
Heads I win, tails you lose...
It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to varifocals and your journey to “the old side” will be complete :o).
“Some programmers, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use AI.’ Now they have banana plantations.”
— Barney Stravinsky
I hope Chesterton doesn’t come back later looking for it.