Matt Kimber

Sensible Programming.

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Steak and Salami
organisations

Steak and Salami

Ever had the feeling you're working constantly and getting nowhere? Specifically, the one where you've got a dozen things to do and none of them are getting done? Did you find that the

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
5 min read
C# to Go: a beginner's journey (part 5)
go

C# to Go: a beginner's journey (part 5)

It's time to clean up GoRender and establish a solid base for adding all the lighting, shading and multiple output targets a full-featured sprite renderer needs. One thing I've noticed is my "iterate

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
17 min read
C# to Go: a beginner's journey (part 4)
go

C# to Go: a beginner's journey (part 4)

Last time round I had got to the point of raycasting a silhouette on a spritesheet, with a largely clean solution that only had a few areas of potential messiness. I think the

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
11 min read
C# to Go: a beginner's journey (part 3)
go

C# to Go: a beginner's journey (part 3)

The next step for GoRender is an easy choice. I want to write the raycaster, a critical part of turning voxel objects into pixel sprites. The C# version involves a lot of vector

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
19 min read
C# to Go: a beginner's journey (part 2)
go

C# to Go: a beginner's journey (part 2)

I'm back on the Go trail, and I have two options for what to do next: 1. Improve my existing code with better knowledge of the IO libraries. 2. Port across some more Transrender functionality.

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
15 min read
C# to Go: a beginner's journey
go

C# to Go: a beginner's journey

How do you learn a new language? Books, practice and a decent chunk of pair programming with someone who knows what they're doing, if available. Those are my favoured options, and when it

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
17 min read
Improvement and imperfection
existential crisis

Improvement and imperfection

I had a minor crisis of confidence earlier today looking at some of the things I've done. Most of my impacts could be uncharitably described as, "you took something that was outrageously shit

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
4 min read
Servant Leader, Helicopter Parent
agile

Servant Leader, Helicopter Parent

Why is developing software so slow now?Provocative statement, so let's unpick. Maybe I'm getting more impatient as I get older, but the pace of modern software development feels glacial. Honestly, why do

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
9 min read
Interviewing by Teaching
teams

Interviewing by Teaching

I've been trialling a new technique in interviews recently, and the results so far have been good so it feels worth sharing.Essentially it's a refinement of the "try to make the interview

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
3 min read
Mentoring, not hiring: The Reality
teams

Mentoring, not hiring: The Reality

Semi-anonymous Internet idiots like me love telling you all these things you should be doing about team structure, organisational approach and Really Exciting Technology but we're often a bit light on what happens

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
20 min read
Methodology? What Methodology?
agile

Methodology? What Methodology?

I think I'm getting kind of post-methodology in my thinking. I don't really care what it is or what it's called, but I do care that it facilitates three critical things

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
5 min read
How to really identify a 10x developer
teams

How to really identify a 10x developer

The sudden trending of "hashtag 10x developer" worries me. It worries me because it's not really about 10x performance, at least most of the time I've seen it. Instead, it tends to bundle two often overlapping movements which are unrelated to performance.

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
7 min read
Agility and the power of No
agile

Agility and the power of No

One of the nice things for me about writing is I get to go back to my old articles every once in a while and see where my viewpoint has matured, where it's changed...

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
5 min read
The 10x Developer and You
organisations

The 10x Developer and You

I'm in the mood for sarcastic graphs. I think (I hope) that the idea of the "10x" developer is not an astonishingly new and radical one. People in the upper quartile

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
3 min read
Thoughts on Interviewing
teams

Thoughts on Interviewing

I think I'm destined to always be an iconoclast when it comes to interviews. Not quite so much as the days when "let's ask programmers some questions about programming" was a

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
12 min read
Thoughts on team leadership and metrics
teams

Thoughts on team leadership and metrics

I realise that in four or so years of this site I've never talked properly about team leadership, which is a bit of an omission given how much time I've devoted to organisational

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
14 min read
The Unreasonable Speed of Rust
development

The Unreasonable Speed of Rust

Rust is fast. No, not the systems language - I'm talking about rust in the sense of losing skills in programming languages when you're no longer actively working in them. I've spent a

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
4 min read
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Uncertainty
development

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Uncertainty

Data/object anti-symmetry broke me. The reason for this breakage was established a year or two ago. I had the fortune to work with some very smart people, who were very good at

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
14 min read
Two Transformation Questions
organisations

Two Transformation Questions

What exactly is a transformation? Is it "go to the cloud" or "be Agile" or "containerise the things"? Despite the number of organisations which state those as

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
4 min read
Performance Reviews
teams

Performance Reviews

I had an interesting conversation last night about that old bugbear, the annual performance review. No matter how many well-meaning attempts have been made with SMART targets or peer review systems, every annual

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
4 min read
The Sierra Adventure Codebase
technical debt

The Sierra Adventure Codebase

We broke something this week. Well, I broke something, if you go by code authorship. It was supposed to be a bug fix, and we did everything by the book - pair-programmed the

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
4 min read
Bias for action and agility
organisations

Bias for action and agility

What has linked all of the high-performing teams and organisations I've worked for or with? That title is a bit of a clue: it's a bias for action. What this means is they

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
9 min read
Bad Team Leads and Responsible Adults
teams

Bad Team Leads and Responsible Adults

Does a team need a team lead? I've been thinking quite a bit about flat team structures over the past couple of weeks. As is often the case, it's recruitment-driven. I'm going to

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
5 min read
Avoiding growth by accretion
architecture

Avoiding growth by accretion

Software has a tendency to grow by accretion - a gradual build-up of material causing what was a small and simple nucleus to become a large, complex object with many layers. It's the

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
6 min read
What my AI learnt on its holidays
ai

What my AI learnt on its holidays

I spent a bit of downtime recently playing with LSTMs and RNNs - Long Short-Term Memories and Recurrent Neural Networks. These are the kind of things that power automatic image tagging, recognition, and

  • Matt Kimber
    Matt Kimber
8 min read
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