After a little bit of scrambling about this morning, I managed to get 2x tickets for Cardiacs at Saint Luke’s, Glasgow. I’ve never been to the venue, so I’m looking forward to seeing the band, and in new surroundings.
Also got tickets for me and the family to see The Last Dinner Party at Edinburgh Corn Exchange, next month. That’ll be my daughter’s first real gig, so we’re all looking forward to that.
Anyway, back to Cardiacs. This is the first video of theirs I saw and it had me hooked from the start: Cardiacs - Tarred and Feathered.
I’d initially thought this was written by Andy Bell, head honcho at Piccalilli (where the article is hosted), but it was written by Liam Egan, whose work I wasn’t familiar with. His piece on Transitioning From Being a Developer to a Manager would’ve been incredibly helpful if I’d been able to read it 20 years ago.
Many modern tech organisations now offer a dual-track career path for developers. One path is for management, and the other is the Individual Contributor (IC) path. Think of it as a fundamental shift in your job’s purpose. As a developer, your primary goal is to solve complex problems. As a manager, your primary goal is to build and support a team that solves complex problems.
This is the case in my workplace, where you’re able to follow a developer path (Associate thru Senior, Lead, Senior Lead to Architect, and beyond) vs a managerial path (Associate, Senior, Manager, Senior Manager, Director etc.) but it wasn’t the case when I was younger.
I just fell into being a people manager. I had no idea how best to do it and made many (so many) mistakes along the way. It was only well into my managerial career that I eventually managed to shift some of the imposter syndrome. It took a while before I felt that I was able to help manage peoples’ workloads and, more importantly help manage their careers and lead them in their own chosen direction.
Incidentally, Liam is Director of Technology for We the Collective, and they have a lovely site.
Vibe coding is an emerging software development practice that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate functional code from natural language prompts, accelerating development, and making app building more accessible, especially for those with limited programming experience.
What is vibe coding?
It’s not a term I like, I’ll admit. Probably too old for it. But it’s something that’s come up in work recently, and as such, is something I’ll need to get used to.
With that in mind, I installed Github Copilot and gave it the task of making this site more usable. Here’s what I (we?) implemented over the course of a couple of evenings.
new centred layout
dark and light mode
spotify integration
bluesky integration
contentful CMS integration
several iterations of each of these
I might put down my thoughts on the experience a bit later, but I’ll also do some more to the site as I gather any cohesive thoughts. In short, for now, it was very helpful but also a tad frustrating.
More site updates to come, not least because this layout and colour scheme is awful.
English rock band (although the term “rock” is selling them short), Cardiacs have been around since 1977 with albums and EPs being released throughout the 1980s and 90s. By the time I became aware of them, in the early 2000s their output had largely dried up.
In 2008 singer Tim Smith suffered a heart attack and stroke. Over the course of the following decade, he focused on his recovery, before ultimately passing from a second heart attack in 2020.
Throughout the 2010s, the rest of the band were always up to something. Their music would be added to Spotify, and then pulled, and then re-added. Albums would be available on their Alphabet Business Concern website (now cardiacs.net) periodically, and then there were some gigs, featuring a host of different vocalists. Most of which were created as fundraisers to help pay for Tim’s care and convalescence. One of those new singers was Cardiacs superfan Mike Vennart, previously of Oceansize, co-founder of Empire State Bastard, and part of Biffy Clyro’s touring band.
Earlier this year, Cardiacs restarted work on the songs that Tim had been working on before his initial health scare. Led by his brother (Cardiacs’ bassist) Jim, and guitarist Kavus Torabi, Cardiacs’ latest album, LSD started to come back to life.
All of which brings us to today, and the release of Cardiacs’ latest album, LSD. An album that’s been in the pipeline since Tim started work on it back in the 2000s.
Although many years have passed since their original conception, the songs sound shiny and new yet are still instantly identifiable as the work of Tim Smith.
While watching Dunkirk and Darkest Hour I realised both movies are about the same subject; the rescue mission to save around 300,000 soldiers from the beach at Dunkirk. In the case of Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman (as Winston Churchill) is at the centre of the story as the British government scramble to pull together a workable plan, and then put it in place.
Anyway, when I realised this, I thought, “I wonder if someone’s created a list of World War 2 movies, and the chronological order in which to watch them, in the same way that people have done for Star Wars and the Marvel Universe?”
As a result, I’ve also watched Part 1 of Hitler: The Rise of Evil, featuring Robert Carlyle as a young Adolf. It’s always odd to see actors voicing what we know are German people, with US accents.
For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse.
