I’ve been thinking about the affordances of GenAI chatbots… There are hidden affordances, where it has capabilities not immediately apparent. There are also false affordances, where the chatbot seems to be usable for a certain thing, but it actually isn’t. Worst still, these false affordances are obscured by the chatbot’s tendency towards cheery sycophancy. An […]
LLM-first search cites sources but hallucinates anyway I recently stopped using Google search because of what I affectionately (and exasperatingly) call GenAI slop. Not being able to disable the LLM generated responses at the top of search results finally became a deal breaker for me. In relation to this, I won’t be using ChatGPT search, […]
Get to know the capability and culture of a provider before you invest in their software In a previous article, I reviewed “Why everyone should care about bad software development”. The purpose of that article was to help us confront the seemingly helpless situations many organisations face when being stuck with expensive and awful software. […]
Software is eating the world! You use software all the time. You’re using software to read this article online right now. Bad software development practices impact you, whether you realise it or not. As a private individual, or a business owner, no one is immune. With my background in software development, I often find myself […]
Every month, I offer a limited number of free 30-minute consultations to startup founders and business owners. If you’d like to benefit from this, please get in touch. Ideally come with a specific problem you want advice on and I’ll see how I can help. My background is technical, so non-tech founders might particularly find […]
EdTech + Blended Learning In 2020, I ran an online workshop for academic colleagues on innovative ways to use Tech to aid teaching and learning. During the session, I asked what everyone thought “blended learning” meant. Here are a selection of the answers: Variety of delivery, can be employer, study based, online, in person etc […]
How gamification motivates people to do extraordinary things (sometimes) One of my recent reads has been Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things by Brian Burke. The concept of Gamification has been around for a long time, it’s nothing new. But, how can Gamification be used for good? In the realm of education […]
Avoiding the pitfalls of working in a vacuum As humans, we know we need oxygen to survive, and the same goes for ideas. Stifle an idea in a vacuum and it’s probably going to die. How do we avoid this? In a word: collaboration. Collaborative learning I am a great advocate of collaborative learning. As […]
Advice for Early Stage Startup Founders If you can, embed yourself in the market well before you launch. It’s much easier to sell as an insider than it is as an outsider. You can partner with prospective customers to help them understand their problems better and therefore find solutions to those problems more easily. Make […]
From teenage coder to Tech Advisor with CITP status I’ve been in tech since I was a teenager. Of course, back then, things were very different to today. The web was still evolving. Social media platforms were still up and coming. Facebook? Twitter? Nope… none of that. My adventures in web development began with with […]