Hello.

I am Neville Kuyt; I’ve been making software professionally for over 3 decades. I am active on Stack Overflow, and on the Rands Leadership Slack channel.

I work at a technology consulting firm. Before that I worked for a digital agency, and a bunch of start-ups. I started my coding career at a management consulting firm, building applications in Visual Basic and SQL.

For most of my career, I’ve been working on web and mobile things that interact with customers. I’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the world - Heineken, Nike, KLM, MINI, Hermès, Johnnie Walker.

I live on a houseboat - a big, Belgian barge - in East London. No, it isn’t cold or damp. Yes, it’s nice to know my neighbours and have a sense of community.

I enjoy reading (and writing) about software development.

Recent Posts

The Pyramid Principle

You’re an expert in your field - a software engineer, perhaps - and you have lots of insights to share. But you find it difficult to get senior management to...

Resume advice

I have hired hundreds of people in my time - software engineers, testers, managers, directors. Here’s what I tell people when they write their CV - or resume...

Analysis + capital + execution = success

In “Succession” S03E09, the Matsson character - start-up founder, smart, not a people person - says something like “I’m bored with success. Analysis plus cap...

A brief thought on politics

Reading some of Isiah Berlin’s essays - he’s a great writer, and a fascinating thinker. Politics, of course, is much more of a narrative art than a science, ...

Running a good meeting.

Running a meeting is an art form. I don’t know anyone who actively enjoys meetings, and I often find myself in meetings which feel like a waste of time. But ...

Software engineering career ladders

This conversation seems to keep coming up – “how do we give software engineers (in the widest sense – DevOps, QA, etc.) a career ladder that allows them to p...

Databases

I’m currently reading Kleppmann’s Designing Data Intensive Applications. It’s a great book - the writing is clear but not simplistic, and there’s a great bal...

Stories and numbers: OKRs

“Where are we, and what should we do” is a question I’ve had to answer on many consulting engagements. It’s often wrapped in very different language – “How d...

Serverless is (mostly) about money.

I’ve been working on software projects for a living for 30 years. In 1989, I worked on a COBOL application which managed orders, production schedules, billin...

Distributed agile development teams

The key to distributed, Agile software development is to get good velocity by making sure the work the developers pick up is “workable”. This means validatin...

Compose first, build last.

I was brainstorming a new product with a client the other day. We had all sorts of amazing ideas, ranging from cool user-interface tweaks to (almost) entirel...

Sleep habits.

I found an article online about re-setting your sleep patterns. 

Working with large, distributed teams

My last few projects have involved large-ish (up to 50 or so) teams, spread across multiple locations. I’ve been reading about this, and had the occasional c...

Offices suck.

About 5 years ago, people realized that they had better IT from Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn than they got from their own IT. Their home devices were much ...

There goes my job – again?

A fairly widely reported story last week explains how Microsoft research have created an AI that can write software. Hacker News went crazy – as you might ex...

Inevitable futures – manufacturing

I recently finished Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable” – it’s good, positive, often revealing. But I want to work through some of the ideas and see what scenario...

Europe.

I feel European. If I shared any of cousin Dirk‘s talents, I’d qualify to play football for 3 countries. I grew up speaking English at home, Dutch at school,...

The tragedy of the mega-pixel

A few years ago, I met an executive from a large camera company. Before digital photography came along, this company’s marketing (and manufacturing) emphasis...

What does “good” look like?

In traditional “waterfall” software development, “good” software meets the written requirements. No matter how bad the requirements – “good” software meets t...

Is web design work drying up?

I was listening to the Tim Ferris podcast where he interview Seth Godin. Seth publishes a new post every day. I’m going to try to write more.

Wintery pasta

Now that it’s getting distinctly autumnal, I’ve been trying to recreate a pasta sauce I had in an Italian restaurant in Berlin a few years ago. No idea if it...

Recipe – chicken cassoulet

I had a quick dinner at Le Pain Quotidien on the King’s Road last week. I chose the Chicken Cassoulet, and found it rather uninspired.

Recipe: Lancashire Carpaccio

Carpaccio is one of my favourite summer dishes. My variant uses dry-brined steak, and Lancashire cheese, rather than Parmesan – the combination of tangy, cre...

Book review: Tulipomania, by Mike Dash

Over the Christmas break, I read Tulipomania, by Mike Dash. The book explores one of the first documented bubbles – and seeks to understand what happened bey...

Process, product and projects.

I’m fortunate – I get to work with some of the best-known companies in the world, and observe the way they approach software and marketing projects. These co...

Stuff I love: XBMC

XBMC is open source software to manage playing media – music, TV and movies, mostly, but you can also use it for YouTube, TED, catch-up TV, games – anything ...

Motorcycle shop you can trust

I always get my bike serviced at Howard Powell’s motorcycles in East Ham. They do a good job, are reasonably priced, and always take care to explain what mat...

Stuff I love: Late Junction on BBC3

I stumbled across Late Junction about 6 years ago – it was a late evening, I’d had a tough few days at work, and got home from a long day in the office just ...

Jealous…

Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing and Pirate Cinema fame, posted a photo of his office. It’s got space, light, books, and coffee…

Mr Penumbra’s 24 hour bookshop

I bought Robin Sloan’s book “Mr Penumbra’s 24 hour bookshop“, and loved it! The book plays with lots of technology themes – cloud computing, cryptography, da...

Software development and productivity

Oh boy. This is one of those subjects – reasonable people can have valid, cogent and totally incompatible views. Here’s what I’ve learnt over the past 15 yea...

The not-so-lean startup

In the heady days of the first dotcom bubble, I left my safe, well-paid job with a management consulting firm to join a start-up as the technical lead. The f...