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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)

@ashley.rolfmore.com

860 followers 2.5K following 2.5K posts

I help software teams navigate capitalism. I help capitalists understand software teams. Highly regulated sectors are my thing. Personal account but also nerd so 🤷‍♀️ 🇬🇧➡️🇵🇹🇪🇺 I only repost images with alt-text.

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · Nov 24

Fwiw, in fintech people tend to find it very obvious that you shouldn’t accidentally send 50000 EUR instead of 500 EUR, or let money disappear.

We currently find the equivalent harder to articulate for other types of software eg products, data or services that might affect the safety of others.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · Nov 18

We as software practitioners (professionals who design/make software) need to learn from adjacent fields like medicine and engineering and consider potential harm to other humans as a basic criteria for our decision making. Hiding it behind abstractions like “customer impact” is cowardly.

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 4d

Well this was a scary topic to write about!
ashley.rolfmore.com/business-is-...

Business is political - a systems thinking approach

⚠️This is a sensitive topic and I have tried to bridge the sensitivity of it with some gentle humour to make some of it more understandable to a wide audience. You are welcome to contact me directly i...

ashley.rolfmore.com

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 5d

Used to work with a PM in my local gov vendor days who cleared the air by whacking a sock of change on the table. I did not realise this was a real turn of phrase now(!)

Years later, I told a colleague about the PM. When they asked, PM said, 'Don't remember, but sounds like something I'd do.'

Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 5d

On why it's (almost) never a "dead cat".

samf.substack.com/p/its-not-a-...

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 5d

If you feel like you've ever messed up at work, watch the latest Slow Horses episode (s5e4). I guarantee you will feel competent afterwards.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 6d

I’m not off the plane yet love calm down

Screenshot of Mail app - survey from airline asking how my flight was - sent 30 minutes before I landed

Reposted by Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)

lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 7d

its really unfortunate the "accidentally became important at work" tweet is the realest shit of all time

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Reposted by Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)

Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 7d

A system designed to help people get better at making software would treat the user and the developer as a continuum instead of a binary.

If you just want to use it, great. If you want to understand more about how something works, it should unfold that context and let you change some things

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 10d

This story brought to you by my 31st flight this year, mainly to the uk, and every. Bloody. time. this same bus is on a *different* diversion when I want to use it.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 10d

I’m just a girl
Waiting for a bus

Oh wait it’s diverted. 🤦‍♀️

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 11d

My plan is to ask the friends of mine who do watch it to see what they think!

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 11d

Are they voting people off using story points?
Is there a daily love island standup?
Are there retros?
Sprints?
Oh wait. Love Island IS basically scrum*? Wat.

*scrum as people think it is, as opposed to what is defined in the scrum guide, not gonna poke that jack-in-the-box.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 11d

For those unaware of just how strange this feels, this is an article from wired in 2010 (www.wired.com/story/werewo...) about this party game. It was being used as a *hiring process* in some tech companies.

Seeing this is kinda analogous to finding out that Love Island uses scrum or something.

Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon

Margaret Robertson reports on the explosion of tech-crowd pastime, Werewolf -- a parlour game about deceit and manipulation

www.wired.com

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 12d

wait wait... they turned the party game werewolves into a reality tv series?

Zoë Crowther @zoecrowther.bsky.social · 12d

Just watched the first two episodes of #CelebrityTraitors and it was TV GOLD

“You can't call someone a Traitor just because they have a better vocabulary than you.”

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 12d

ok this seemed funnier in my head oh well

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 12d

YOU get a gender! YOU get a gender! EVERYONE gets a gender!

a woman in a red dress is holding a microphone in her hand .

Alt: Oprah you get a car meme

media.tenor.com

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 12d

I originally took this to mean "an adult to cut you off in conversation when you're being a arse" but actually both are valid here.

Reposted by Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 13d

This is maybe my least pro-market position: the good thing about drinking in a pub is there is an adult who can cut you off, something which cannot happen when you are drinking alone with the booze you bought at Tesco.

Altreik @altreik.bsky.social · 13d

Should go further and tax supermarket beer at a higher rate than at the moment- raises revenue, targets the biggest source of binge drinking and might help get people back into pubs.

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Reposted by Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)

The Daily Tism @thedailytism.com · 17d

Fitzgerald said: “I thought that childhood was a game that I had to win, so I’ve been doggedly copying everyone around me. Now, everyone thinks I’m normal, except they all still seem to hate me a little bit, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.”

Autistic toddler hitting all developmental milestones realises she’s inadvertently fucked it

An autistic toddler who has hit all of her developmental milestones on time has realised she may have unintentionally shot herself in the foot. Lottie Fitzgerald, three, displays a number of typical…

thedailytism.com

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 12d

A primer on Taxonomies, Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs without any maths in it. I have tried to make this understandable for as wide an audience as feasible. (Mainly written as an excuse to use my cats as an example for something yet again) - ashley.rolfmore.com/taxonomies-o...

Taxonomies, Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs: a primer

I’ve lived in this world long enough that some of these ideas just feel obvious to me, but I’ve learned they often aren’t. In most workplaces I’ve been in, fluency in how these ideas connect between ...

ashley.rolfmore.com

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 13d

Reminds me of this classic: bash.rip?190832

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 13d

Well what can our darling Tarquin do if the English courses are full with those foreigners? He was so interested in reading, we bought him all those books. Given, he's mainly used them for rollups but he would be so more fulfilled if he can study English at university.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 14d

I appreciate criticising Badenoch’s announcements is like yelling into the void - pointless at best, sanity damaging at worst but we really REALLY need to kill this idea that education is only useful if you can think of a practical use immediately.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 14d

The database tech that most modern databases run on started in some obscure paper no one deemed useful at the time. Maybe even say… a rip off?

Then SSDs were invented and needed a different way to structure data. Voila!

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 14d

All of these subjects are extremely useful to society. (And honestly, we’re naff at predicting future useful, study it for the pursuit of knowledge anyway.)

Do I really have to bring back my “drama taught me more about working in modern tech than my IT lessons” again?

• POLITICS
Badenoch: Curb students taking 'rip-off' degrees such as English
The performing arts, sociology and anthropology are among the subjects the Conservatives would like to cut
Caption:
Kemi Badenoch will use her conference speech to argue that the current system leaves both students and taxpayers worse off (Photo: Nicola Tree/Getty Images)

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 15d

Also, this classic: www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db...

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Steve

www.smbc-comics.com

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her) @ashley.rolfmore.com · 15d

If you are ND in some way, notably if you have those traits often associated with autistic peeps, often something "clicks" in your brain between the age of 26 and 33. It can make life a LOT less stressful.

essencesimmone.blacksky.app @essencesimmone.blacksky.app · 18d

Those who are 35+, what advice do you have for people just entering their 30s?

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