I'll make this short and sweet. I felt that we needed a new license. Blogfile was/is released under the WTFPL, and it's sub-project, SHITLang was also released under the same license.

I have no interest in maintaining SHITLang, and wanted to discourage people from trying to get me to look at pull requests.

Anyway, today, it is moving to the brand new license that I created (based heavily on the concept of the WTFPL): the Do I Look Like I Give A Shit Public License.

So what should this license be used for?

• You are sick of maintaining a side project
• You really don't give a shit about the project
• You …

Let's talk about how we teach new people to program.

There is a saying which I see getting thrown around frequently in the mailing lists and user groups for programming languages. Everyone knows the saying, and I used the latter half of it as the title for this post.

"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you've fed him for life."

This is a common refrain when people ask for resources to learn to program. I see it for Python; I see it for PHP; I see it for JavaScript; I see it in almost every community I'm a part of. People say it meaning that new users should s…

I have a problem with recruiters. Shocking, I know. If you ask around developers, recruiters quite often seem to be right near the top of the list for "things which tech would be far better without".

If you're a recruiter reading this, then please don't skip straight to posting angry diatribes in the comment section - I'm happy to explain where my problem comes from, and maybe even how to fix it. If you're not a recruiter, but have run into some of the same problems, then maybe you might even want to confirm that I'm not alone here.

Let's start with a short anecdote. I was recently contacted b…

I was going to buy a book online today. A once-off purchase on a whim. I didn't buy it because the company selling it wanted to "get to know me". This isn't a very interesting story, I know, but a point will be made.

The company insisted that I had to create an account (although it already had my shipping details) to make the purchase. It was vital that I didn't miss out on the features of an account; so vital that I couldn't give them money until I had done it. The company insisted that it needed to know my name, and my phone number, and my address, and my date of birth.

So I walked away.

This …

There seems to be a trend among freelancers to complain loudly about the stupidity of their worst clients. It occasionally makes for amusing reading, but in principal, I don't think that's it's professional to do so. Even anonymous clients who, while not being named, still get shamed, deserve better. If you're doing this, and expecting to be treated like a professional, you should probably stop; as I have mentioned before, if the client relationship breaks down, then you are probably not communicating properly.

I generally try not to talk about my specific clients at all on this blog, not beca…