Category: Articles

Getting a cart out of a rut is hard. The sides are steep and it’s hard to gain purchase. Just a slight turn to either side is ineffective. The wheels won’t catch; they just hit the sides & bounce off. To get it out you need to commit. Making a confident directional change and then…

Marc recently wrote a post called Disclaimer. Disclaimers, wordy intros, apologies: they’re all unnecessary. They water down the message. It resonated with me. I’ve already mentioned my tendency to tag on “In my opinion“, “I feel” or “I think” to my written word. It’s just redundancy.

Around 2010 there was a spate of blog posts bemoaning the end of the comment thread. The claim was that Twitter was making us dumber. We were too busy, or too lazy, to spend the time to craft a response to posts. Heck we were too busy to read posts. They had a point. The network…

2024 update: I never wrote this book. As I alluded yesterday, I am going to write a book about OneNote. I’ve been a fan of OneNote for over 10 years and have been meaning to write  this book for as long as I can remember. It has two main aims: I’ve put off writing the book because…

Quite a few of my old narratives were well and truly crushed today: I am unfit I don’t do running I’ll never run a marathon These were stories I was telling myself. Turns out all I needed to do was set my mind to it, turn up and do the work. It helps that I…

I remember watching the first London Marathon on the TV as a kid in 1981. It was a big deal. This was back when we only had 3 channels on the TV. The BBC gave it rolling coverage for well into the afternoon. It was like the Olympics or a royal wedding. It made for…

Are you a glass half full or glass half empty person? The chances are that if you’re tending towards the empty, that you also suffer from anxieties. You may even have a black dog following you around from time to time. It’s not that you’re a doom and gloom merchant. You can see the joy in the…

This is a personal post, an actual note to self; a reminder. Last week was pretty tough. I’ve felt the physical effects of stress again, my ‘stress related somatoform pain‘. Nowhere like the bad old days where it was a constant, but definitely there; the first time in over 6 months. The headaches, the sinus pains, tinnitus and the physical sensations…

I quite like those pictures of people’s bags and their contents that sometimes get tweeted about. It’s slightly voyeuristic, but also you get ideas for practical stuff to keep with you at all times. So, in what is officially my second Filler PostTM for #30DWC  I thought I’d share details about my bag, albeit without an amazing photo…

There’s an advert you see on the tube and elsewhere of  woman yawning and – I think – the strap-line is something like ‘Tired of being tired?’ That is my 30s summed up in one sentence, right there. At the time put it down to having baby twins, to having just started a business and to working…

It was touch and go whether I’d post anything today. I’ve spent most of the day in meetings or driving across the country and am now at a hotel, dog tired. I also have a new thing to try to cram into my schedule and that’s some coding for a side project, the first time I’ll be…

I’m sitting here with a bit of a sadface writing this. My physio has told me that I’m not allowed to go running until the day of my Marathon now. I overdid it in my last race (against his instructions!) so I need to rest my shins. This has totally messed my training plan up, I should…

As an engineer I am probably the last person that you should listen to on the subject of manners or emotional intelligence. If you do want to read a really great post on politeness and manners, go here. It’ll really stop and make you think.

It can feel daunting to come up with ideas for things to write about because someone else has already written about it before and it’s probably too obvious anyway, right? Wrong. It’s OK to write about stuff that other people have already written about. There is always going to be somebody who’s interested in what you’ve got to…

Today I’m starting to re-purpose old content into an email course aimed at designers and front-end developers. I’ll work on this in the coming days, for instance they need top and tailing, and all content is draft, but I wanted to get the majority of the structure down. I’ll also likely merge some sections and make…

Today I’m writing with a work hat on and am sketching out some product ideas. From these I may then expand them out into one or more long-form service offering pages for my website. Premise My company Siftware specialises in providing maintenance & support services to the owners and managers of complex PHP applications. We have been building and maintaining…

More catching up. Yesterday – Saturday – I got to bed at 3:40am after driving across the country from Gatwick; I was dog tired to say the least. Even so, at 8am I jumped out of bed, showered, ironed a shirt and was out of the door heading into town by 9am. What could motivate me to…

I’m slightly cheating here. The first day of Marc’s 30 Day Writing Challenge started when I was sunning myself on a lounger in Morocco (a cheeky 4 day break during Easter) and there was no way that I was motivated to be writing, or indeed thinking, about anything other than when to get another beer. Well,…

I’ve been rather introspective the last couple of years. I’ve purposely kept my head down and have focused on my health, my family and my business; the most important stuff. Whilst I have stuck my head up occasionally to pop the odd post on this blog, the majority of the time I’ve kept my thoughts…

TL;DR this is an open letter to people organising conferences in 2016 who are looking to fill slots on webbish subjects, tending towards software development, that would be both palatable and valuable to a commercially focused audience. If you’d like to discuss further then please email bealers@siftware.com, or call my office on 0845 680 9676. Also, to my peers…

Standing desks have been fashionable for a while. When I say a while I mean that they are such old news that it’s now become fashionable to migrate away from them instead. Well, I was still in the “what’s all this fuss about” camp until last week when driving past Ikea Birmingham, on the spur of the…

I’ve been thinking a lot about goals this week. Being the middle of the year it’s a great time to be reviewing the few I did set  (I was quite easy on myself for the first half of this year) and looking forward to what I want to achieve in the second half of the…

Some people dread reaching middle age. I know I used to, but now I’m there or thereabouts, I’m loving it. I love that I sort of know who I am and how I tick. I love that I know that where I am is mostly where I want to be.  Also, most importantly, I love how…

I’ve not talked about this subject previously as I didn’t want be seen to be a health bore and it felt quite self-indulgent. But inspired by some recent blog posts I’ve read, I thought I’d briefly share my own experiences. Last year a perfect storm of poor lifestyle choices caught up with me. I’m talking about a crap diet, no exercise,…

Truth be told I’m really glad to be seeing the back of 2014; let’s just say it has been a challenging year. I appear to have gotten through it mostly intact, though, and I am looking forward to 2015 to see how the changes I’ve been implementing both in my life and my business will play out. One of…

Two blog posts in one week, unheard of. That’s what you get when you cram two high-octane conferences into one week: MicroConf Europe in Prague Sunday to Tuesday and then The Web Is in Cardiff, Thursday and Friday. I could write reams about my experiences of both extremely high quality, motivating, thought provoking and at some times very moving…

TL;DR I’d much rather be in the woods than sitting in front a of a screen all day. I’ve realised this now and will start doing more of it again. Feel free to join me. I’m writing this post from my hotel room in Cardiff where I’m attending theweb.is conference. I should be heading out…

Recently Justin Jackson wrote a great post entitled Do things that scare you which really resonated with me. It uses a metaphor of someone dropping off the wall of a half-pipe on a skateboard: It’s scary as hell, because the next step is to commit: you have to force yourself to put weight on your front leg…

One evening in 2007 I got frustrated by once again having to strip out all of the styling from one of the then default WordPress themes (remember Kubrick?) prior to building a client’s site, so I created a simple boiler-plate theme called Worpdress Naked and uploaded it to this blog. Amazingly since then approaching 16,000 people appear to…

Right now I reckon in some way you’re failing at something. I know I am, but I’m Ok with it. Seriously. To succeed you need to have criteria to define the success by. I’m a bit uneasy with the term ‘success criteria’ as it’s a bit too management speak so let’s call these criteria goals shall…

This article was originally posted on The Pastry Box in May 2014. Do you have an itch that you keep meaning to scratch? An idea that just won’t go away but life keeps getting in the way? As hard as you might try you’re never able to carve out enough time to move things forwards? Welcome…

You know how some people jump out of perfectly good airplanes, climb mountains or cuddle a tarantula to confront their fears? Well I launched a podcast to confront mine and it’s called A Bit More Backendy. My fear is a pretty minor one: it’s a fear of being put on the spot publicly and because…

Background I’ve not regularly cycled since I left London 4 years ago. There I would commute circa 10 miles a day on my cheapy Raleigh hybrid. Since moving to our current house I tried my new commute once on the aforementioned cheapy Raleigh and it was horrendous. The (big) hill home nearly killed me and…