Around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote about developing software in remote teams. Over the past few years, I've also had a few conversations about developing software part-time—usually to the effect of we don't do it.

About six months ago, I wrote about Peter Cappelli's arguments concerning the existence or otherwise of skills shortages, and what to do about them.

Amongst widespread publicity on topics like climate change, pollution and resource consumption, I'm sure many of us would like to think of ourselves as good environmental citizens.

I think I've been hearing about "skills shortages" for as long as I've been in the computer industry, yet at various times heard anecdotes from highly-qualified and experienced software developers (including me) that finding work takes many months.

Most of what I read in software engineering textbooks, magazine articles, and blogs seems to assume large teams of developers working on sprawling projects for giant organisations like Microsoft, Google or the Apache Foundation.

In response to the Australian Government’s proposal to force search and social media companies to negotiate payment with news publishers, Google threatened to leave the country and Facebook decided to remove news content from its service. The latter decision in particular left a lot of organisations scrambling for what to do.