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• Post #3843137

  Completed my first 'Making Tax Digital' (even though I've been filing digitally for over 20 years) submission. I am still unsure as to what the benefit is in doing this, as HMRC now knows something they would have been told later anyway, and they won't get the money any sooner. But I am £228 worse off for the privilege. #MakingTaxDigital

• Post #2474502

  TIL: Gibraltar does not have, and has never had, a waste water treatment plant, and instead discharges everything into the sea. Makes United Utilities look like Captain Planet and the Planeteers in comparison. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/06/uk-territory-gibraltar-dumps-raw-sewage-mediterranean

• Post #2474501

  New business blog post: Why I work remotely (the advantages far outweigh the downside of not having colleagues to talk to, even though I miss that sometimes). https://www.phpdeveloper.org.uk/why-i-work-remotely/ #business #freelance #freelancing

• Post #2474500

  Has anyone got an example of a skills audit template for developers that they've found useful? I am about to do this for a team for the first time and would find a template useful as a starting point.

• Post #2474499

  Next film club choice is The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals. Mildly disappointed that the main character is called Paul, given that I like musicals... Thursday 21st May at 19:00 UK time (UTC+1). Remote (using Teams) so anyone can join - we have people from across the UK and even the US. Message me if you would like to come - we don't share it widely due to gate-crashers in the past. #FilmClub

• Post #2474498

  Whilst everywhere else is breaking for Reform or the Greens, there's an unexpected result in my ward: Wife of our Labour MP loses her seat to the Workers Party of Britain (George Galloway's party). #ukpol

• Post #2474497

  Today's personal programming challenge: working out how to traverse a directory structure in Go and do the following: 1. If a directory, create the same path under another path (e.g. content/mydir -> output/mydir). 2. If a file, either copy it as-is to the same path (e.g. content/my.pdf -> output/my.pdf) or run it through a function to convert it (e.g. content/my.md -> output/my.html). This for an extremely simple static site generator, as I'm fed up with...

• Post #2474496

  One of the book / film clubs I'm in is passing round the bowl for donations to cover the Meetup fees. I put in a higher amount than anyone else to date, and everyone since has paid that amount too. Feels like a game of poker...

• Post #2474495

  Today's fun challenge: Fixing all the issues that arise when you move a project from a shared hosting provider with very few restrictions to a VPS with a lot more restrictions (all sensible ones like 'you can't insert into a table whilst not providing values for NOT NULL columns with no DEFAULT'). 115 tables need to be fixed...

• Post #2474494

  Problem with political turmoil is that one side of me loves it because I'm a massive politics nerd, and the other side hates it because I would quite like some stability. I never refer to the situation as a circus though, because a circus is a collection of talented, hard-working individuals co-operating to produce a polished final product. #ukpol

• Post #2474493

  I mentioned this to one of my friends recently, but I should make it clear to others: if you're applying for something, or writing a dissertation / thesis and you want it proof-read, I'm happy to do this. Just be prepared for a detailed breakdown of any queries I have. 😄

• Post #2444245

  UK Upper Tribunal rules that uploading documents to an 'open source' LLM breaches confidentiality and waives legal privilege (by putting them in the public domain). Not sure the tribunal has understood what 'open source' means (ChatGPT is, Copilot isn't apparently) but that's the decision. Could be overturned by a higher court, but a warning not to just chuck stuff into LLMs and assume it will be fine. Munir v Secretary of State for the Home Depa...

• Post #2372706

  LetsEncrypt stopping issuance is a reminder of why we shouldn't be reliant on a single service for all of our certificates, no matter how good they are. Same goes for everyone sitting behind Cloudflare or reliant on a single AWS region.

• Post #1124378

  Things I regularly find challenging to get prospective clients to understand with software development: 1. It takes far more time than you expect. 2. It costs far more than you expect (a bespoke web app for example is thousands of pounds, if not tens of thousands). 3. There is no such thing as a '2 minute fix'. 4. Companies like eBay, AutoTrader etc. have teams of people like me (no I can't clone their site in 1 month for £200). #business #freelance #freelancing

• Post #1089180

  If I had a pound for every time I've said to a potential client that I need to look at the code to see what state it's in, and they responded 'oh the current developer told me it's great and documented and in version control', I would be able to retire by now. (the amount of times where the current developer is right is probably a single digit percentage)

• Post #1089179

  @neil Working on my talk on the German Occupation of the Channel Islands, and probably a lot of walking.

• Post #1089178

  @neil I keep meaning to go back to Alderney, and visit Jersey and Guernsey for the first time. I should probably just book something otherwise I'll keep putting it off!

• Post #1089177

  I really wish Mediawiki had the equivalent of wp-cli - having to manually download, extract, and run maintenance commands is a bit of a faff and I'm lazy. (I should probably work out a way of automating this, it's written in PHP and the instructions are the same each time) #PHP #Mediawiki

• Post #1089176

  Currently working on my talk on the German Occupation of the Channel Islands. One of the hard things about wanting to know EVERYTHING about the subject is that I have to stop myself getting distracted and buying all the books referenced by the books I already have. #history

• Post #1089174

  I love this story about the name 'marmalade' being dropped (spoiler: it's not), not only because it infuriates parts of the media I don't like, but also because it demonstrates again how Yes (Prime) Minister has an episode for most political news stories (this time it's Party Games, where the predecessor to the EU wants to BAN THE BRITISH SAUSAGE). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/04/breakfast-reset-will-marmalade-really-be-renamed-in-post-brexi...

• Post #1089173

  Happy Making Tax Digital Day to all those freelancers who are now compelled to comply with this meaningless additional red tape for no advantage to anyone. (I object to the name in particular, as it implies I wasn't keeping my records digitally before, when in fact I've done so for 20 years and only filed online)

• Post #1089172

  I completely disagree with this article suggesting that Manchester is the UK's second city. London is the second city, Manchester is the first. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8r4e106z43o #Manchester

• Post #1089171

  Not sure if this is even possible with ActivityPub, but a really useful feature would be to see how many of the people I follow have blocked someone when viewing their profile (just a count, not their names). If it's more than 1, they're probably not someone worth following.

• Post #1089170

  Today's challenge: Recalculating the aggregate figures for 6+ years worth of data and then comparing them to check that nothing has changed. Thankfully MariaDB makes it easy to copy a table (CREATE t1_copy AS (SELECT * FROM t1)) and then compare using EXCEPT. Will write this up as a blog post in the coming weeks. #sql #php #MariaDB

• Post #1089169

  Slow handclaps for the police car parked to block road access due to an emergency, not realising that this also stops the fire engine getting down the road (they have left the car so can't even move it quickly)

• Post #1041095

  I have noticed a rift develop in the programming community recently, between those who think AI is great and will gradually get rid of a lot of programming work, and those who think it is overhyped, unethical and environmentally destructive (I am in the latter camp). It feels like the Brexit / Remain rift, where I simply cannot understand how the other side doesn't see it from my point of view, and they think the same about mine (I know because they've told me). 😢

• Post #632432

  I got an email this morning notifying me that UKUUG Ltd has now been (voluntarily) struck off at Companies House, bringing an end to over 35 years of conferences and other events. I have written a goodbye post on my personal blog: https://www.roguetory.org.uk/archives/2026/03/11/goodbye-ukuug-floss-uk/ #UKUUG

• Post #631806

  Just had a private Covid vaccination. If anyone in England (and possibly the rest of the UK) is looking to get one, Tesco are cheaper than Boots (£90 vs £98.25), have more pharmacies offering it, and seem to be using Pfizer or Moderna (I've had both in the past from them). You might have to speak to a specific person at the pharmacy as only one knew how bookings worked and only one was qualified to give the vaccine.

• Post #575497

  I think I have got a working function that will convert a start of month date and an ISO week to the start date of that week, even when week 1 of year X starts in year X-1 (effectively converting calendar years to ISO years, which are nearly always the same, except for the edge cases where they're not). This should make filtering and ordering *much* easier on a project that works mainly on a weekly basis (scheduling deliveries) but also needs monthly and 'last X weeks' r...

• Post #575496

  Downside to being really keen on writing documentation: Nearly all the documents in Google Drive are owned by me by default as the creator. Not a problem until I wanted to transfer them all to another account, and you can only do one at a time...