Not long after I passed a major birthday this year, the Australian Computer Society's Information Age published an article Too Old to Hire, Too Young to Retire, reporting the frustration of older computing workers feeling ignored by recruiters.

Many treatises on skills required by modern workers—software developers and other kinds of engineer in particular—laud "problem solving", yet few schools or universities teach a course called Problem Solving.

Around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote about research into remote working in software development. At the time, some research approached the topic in an oblique way, insofar as remote working is a part of "global" and open source software development.

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.

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.

"Social distancing" responses to COVID-19 have ordered people to work from home wherever possible. No doubt this includes many software developers, who might ordinarily be conducting daily stand-up meetings and other forms of face-to-face communication called for by modern software development processes.