Pasta e Fasule, as made by my Neapolitan Nonna Luisa

Pasta e Fasule is Neapolitan for Pasta e Fagiole which is Italian for Pasta and Beans

Pasta and bean soup reminds me of being looked after when recovering from an illness as a kid. I like it so thick the spoon will stand up.

You can use odds and ends of pasta or break spaghetti in. When my dad was little he'd be sent to the pasta shop to get their broken odds and ends. They were cheaper.

It turns out that Neapolitan pizza dough is a strictly described thing. The UK version of the EU rules are here. Those instructions use 1.8 kilograms of flour and 1 litre of water. But (if you're not going to a wholesaler) flour comes in 1 kilogram bags. Ingredients have been adjusted to 1kg for this recipe.

I sometimes use a biga starter. Instructions for that are here. But it takes more work, time, and nuance.

This recipe can be completed in a single day and makes a very consistently tasty dough

(Yes! That much salt)

Be careful to have lots of good bread available to soak up the tasty oil when you're finished! 👩‍🍳👌

We've had photovoltaic (PV) solar panels generating electricity on our roof for exactly 5 years. I've explained the impact a few times privately or on the tooter website. I'm writing it down here so that I don't have to re-remember all the details each time. And since electricity prices are in the news at the moment and it might be useful to some folks.

We had 14 panels installed on 25th August 2017. It cost £4,793.25 which included 5% VAT. Our house is south facing at the rear. They've generated 17.06MWh of electricity in the last five years.

That's 17,060Kwh or a little over 17,000 "units".

And that represents around 4 tonnes of CO₂ "saved".

Tony Benn once said: "I have divided politicians into two categories: the Signposts and the Weathercocks. The Signpost says: 'This is the way we should go.' And you don't have to follow them but if you come back in ten years time the Signpost is still there. The Weathercock hasn’t got an opinion until they've looked at the polls, talked to the focus groups, discussed it with the spin doctors."

I heard this quote recently and it has really struck me…

Having changed problem domain, work environment, stack, and programming language this last year I'm wondering what signpost I want to be.

I've finished at the Co-op after four years. I was feeling emotional and wrote some "wise words". I thought I'd record them here. In the future, when I'm reminiscing, they can transport me back to this feeling.

Here is something I had to write down at work. Something I've tried to say (with varying success) more than once. That I'm publishing here so I can refer back to it in future and in case it is useful for someone else

When I am thinking about this, I am thinking about three things

Two of the agile principles

• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

• Simplicity–the art of maximising the amount of work not done–is essential.

And the XP Rule

• Refactor Mercilessly

Since October 2017 I've been keeping week notes. I've found them a fantastic tool to track my focus and to remember to reflect on success (or lack of it). I didn't write them for most of 2020. When pandemic hit it seemed too self-centered. I wish I'd kept them up now.

I wrote year notes last year. Surprisingly that was the only blog post I wrote last year 😱

Here are mine for 2020… It feels egotistical… but it's intended to remind me to reflect. Hopefully it's useful to me in the future even if it isn't to anyone else.

Since October 2017 I've been keeping week notes. I've found them a fantastic tool to track my focus and to remember to reflect on success (or lack of it).

Some colleagues and some tooters have written year notes as 2019 ends. And here are mine… It feels egotistical… but hopefully it's useful to me in the future even if it isn't to anyone else.

At the 2019 Manchester Java Unconference I attended a discussion on "Cloud Native Functions". It turned out nobody in the group had used "cloud native" but I've been working with teams using serviceful systems.

I have a bad habit of talking more than I should but, despite my best efforts, the group expressed interest in hearing what teams at Co-op Digital had learned in the last ten months or so of working with serviceful systems in AWS.

We defined some terms, covered some pitfalls and gotchas, some successes, and most of all our key learning: that once you can deploy one serviceful system into production you can move faster than you ever have before.

Let's spend a little while defining our terms…