I'd like to capture in writing something that I spoke about in a sermon, a few weeks ago, that I titled "Not exactly as planned".

Remember this, and shew yourselves men: bring it again to mind, O ye transgressors. Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure: Calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executeth my counsel from a far country: yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it.

Isaiah 46:8-11

In the King James Version (KJV) of the bible the phrase "I will do all my pleasure" is translated in several other versions as "I will accomplish all my purpose". From this and other verses, we understand that the will of God is going to be completed as he has chosen and to his pleasure. Kind of comes with the territory for an all powerful deity, so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. This certainty is how we can read the book of Revelations and be certain that the victory we see there is absolutely certain to happen. Yet, even within that absolutely guaranteed victory we still see a number (unfortunately a large number) of people reject the Lord's attempts to warn them of the foolishness of their rejection of him. Even within the accomplishment of the will of God, we see human freewill being exercised.

Not the first time that AC/DC's classic track Thunderstruck has appeared on this site, but today we have a 10 minute long remix for those times when you just can't get enough Thunderstruck.

Remixes are different from the normal covers I like to feature around here. They typically include audio samples from the original track, but then those samples are carefully mixed in such a way as to bring a whole different feel to the original track. A reasonable man might conceed that a remix is not strictly a cover, but I like remixes as much as covers, so I have no intention of being that reasonable man today.

(It looks like I wrote most of this back in 2015. I've dusted it off and present it for your edutainment.)

It's time to rant about a technology issue close to my heart. I realize that the gold standard for technology rants has been set by Steve of Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and the incomparable Zed Shaw. This means I should either swear often or only write after consuming significant quantities of alcoholic beverages. Ever the rebel, I'm going to dispense with both of these requirements and enjoy a nice cup of tea instead.

At Benevolent Employer, they are trying really hard to fix things. As is often the case with large companies which have been around for many decades, there is much to fix. I wholeheartedly endorse fixing stuff. The problem is that they are trying to fix testing, particularly unit testing, as if it was a standalone thing that they could upgrade by creating enough PowerPoint slides and new policies. What they need to fix first is their understanding of what testing is and then they can proceed on to the step of testing better.

Updated: 28th October 2020

It's an interesting life being a Technical Lead as I discovered when I became one in an IT department. I simultaneously discovered that it is both a vitally important role and an oft mis-understood one.

At the instance of Benevolent Employer where I first made my discovery, the role of Technical Lead had absolutely no definition outside of a few required documents that you were supposed to create. Fortunately, it was realized informally within the company, that the role was where an experienced developer could bring their knowledge, experience and wisdom to a project. That they could positively influence every technical aspect from the architecture to the day to day activities of the individual programmers. It was this aspect of the role that I most loved.

I'm learning PHP. Technically I'm re-learning it, as I learned it many years ago (version 5.0 if I remember correctly), but between the passage of time ravaging my memory and all of the new features in it and the infrastructure around it, it feels like learning it for the first time.

I understand that the accepted thing to do with PHP is complain about it instead of writing programs in it, but I have no intention of doing that. PHP is a good language that is constantly improving and it has some amazing tools springing up around it. What I want to talk about is the experience of going from a static, strongly typed language to a dynamic, loosely typed one.

I'm working in PHP because reasons (as the young people like to say) and the time frame I'm trying to work with is shorter than would let me thoroughly learn one of my dream languages like Erlang or Elixir. Until six months ago, I was a Java programmer and had over 20 years of experience in the language having worked with it since version 1.0 back in the mid-nineties. I chose not to work with Java for a number of reasons, each of which deserve their own blog post, but basically I don't trust Oracle's stewardship of the Java language and Java web frameworks are generally gigantic monstrosities that I find to be a pain to program in. (I also seem to be entirely unable to overcome my irrational hatred of Spring, so that doesn't help.) The Java language itself is still nice and I continue to like it, but everything that surrounds it these days is questionable to my way of thinking.