This is Steve Oxley’s website. Welcome!
I’m currently working on Nudgsicle.
Go to About to learn more about me. The latest posts from my microblog are listed below.
Microblog feed
A few weeks ago I finally captured a POV of a run down the Return to Sender trail on Canfield mountain. I just got to where I could clear every jump on this trail last summer, and in this video I linked them all together in a single run!
Aug 28, 2025 11:09 amI finished reading Release It! by Michael Nygard recently. It was a great read - highly recommended - and triggered a number of thoughts which I explore in Robust Software, Clear Thinking, and Production Excellence in Release It!.
Aug 26, 2025 8:00 amI included some reader comments in my latest article about how to apply the principle of production purpose. See what other people think in Speed? Stability? or Making 💰? How to clarify software priorities
Aug 8, 2025 2:24 pmI finished listening to the book Buy Then Build this morning. I felt like the author was trying to make acquisition entrepreneurship sound easy while saying stuff like, You only need $100k down! and describing a process that sounds an awful lot like buying a house on steroids… and then you have a company that you have to run. Not for the faint of heart, but I admit I’m intrigued.
Aug 6, 2025 8:10 pmHow do you resolve distractions so that you can focus on what I like to call your main quest? I explore the options in this article.
Jul 30, 2025 11:13 amI wrote a blog post about a (fairly obvious, but easy to overlook at times) principle I discovered as part of my work the past few years at Seeq. Read about it here.
Jul 18, 2025 8:03 amI have fully collected and analyzed the results of my polls about how long people are waiting for code review. I wrote up my report here: https://nudgsicle.com/articles/code-review-wait-survey-results.html
Jun 6, 2025 11:54 amDoes expired bear spray put the bear at risk of food poisoning?
May 29, 2025 1:18 pmI recently purchased some foam dart blasters for myself kids. They are as fun as I hoped they would be. I’ll share more details on the experience, but I can highly recommend the following blasters:
- https://nerf.fandom.com/wiki/Spectrum
- https://nerf.fandom.com/wiki/Racer
- https://dartzoneblasters.com/product/desperado/
And strongly warn against this piece of crap (at least all three that I bought were duds):
New discussion questions for Release It! are live on Kook Book Nook. It’s a good book; you should come read it with us ;)
- https://www.kookbooknook.com/t/what-do-you-hope-to-get-out-of-reading-release-it-preface/14/4
- https://www.kookbooknook.com/t/what-level-of-criticality-are-the-systems-that-you-work-on-preface/15/1
- https://www.kookbooknook.com/t/whats-the-hairiest-or-most-expensive-bug-youve-had-to-fix-chapter-1/19/2
Is this the future?
“Siri, I’d like to watch a 10 episode, hour-per-episode show. Use the books I’ve been reading recently for inspiration (I especially like the sci-fi one you generated for me last week), but try to surprise me. Make sure not to end the 10 episodes on a cliffhanger, but leave it open for a future multi-episode installment if I feel like continuing.”
Siri generates the first episode, my wife and I sit down to watch.
May 13, 2025 9:05 pmI learned a cool tip about how to add details to foliage in this blog post from the art director of Bluey: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director - Chapter 1. It recommends organizing details around an orb. I decided that fir trees are more of a cone, so I tried to organize around a cone instead.
My 5 year old daughter likes drawing, and I think it would be fun to get back into it again, so I’m trying to do a little drawing every day. Here’s a bad drawing of my mug.
I was recently on a walk with my 2 year old daughter. We were having a pleasant time. I said to her, “I’m glad to have you around. I like you.”
To which she responded, “I know. Where’s mommy?”
May 9, 2025 5:07 pmI decided to try out dlvr.it for syndicating the RSS feed from my microblog on my website to my social media accounts. There are two main things I’m interested in:
- how does it handle links?
- how does it handle threads?
- how does it handle HTML like this unordered list?
There doesn’t appear to be any customization. And I think this microblog post should prove a good test. We will see how it goes!
May 2, 2025 3:06 pmI’ve been reading the book Release It, and I’ve started putting discussion questions on Kook Book Nook. The first few topics to discuss the book are already up. Come read with me! (Also remember there’s a 40% discount to buy the book at https://pragprog.com/ with discount code stevenoxley.)
I’m relaunching the Release It! book club on Kook Book Nook (yes, the name is kooky on purpose), which is a Discourse forum I set up specifically for book clubs. I felt a forum would be a better format for the types of discussions I want to have with you about this book. Come join me and let’s learn from each other and have some fun along the way.
Click this link to get started.
Apr 17, 2025 5:52 pmI’m not a food blogger. I’m not into baking. But now that I have been diagnosed with celiac disease, I have figured out how to make (actually good) gluten-free bread at home, and if you’re like me, you might want to save some money and do it, too. Here’s the recipe: https://www.stevenoxley.com/blog/2025/03/27/go-to-gluten-free-bread/.
Mar 27, 2025 7:07 amIn Release It! chapter 3, Nygard makes distinctions between faults, errors, and failures:
- Fault: “A condition that creates an incorrect internal state in your software.”
- Error: “Visibly incorrect behavior.”
- Failure: “An unresponsive system.”
“Triggering a fault opens the crack. Faults become errors, and errors provoke failures.. That’s how the cracks propagate.”
What do you think of these distinctions and this terminology for system failures?
#ReleaseItBookClub #ReleaseItBookClubChapter3
In the past, I have used these terms interchangeably. I suppose I mostly refer to errors. It may be handy to have more precise terms to describe these stages of failure.
Mar 26, 2025 6:44 amNygard states that “the major dangers to your system’s longevity are memory leaks and data growth.” Can you think of other major dangers to system longevity?
#ReleaseItBookClub #ReleaseItBookClubChapter3
I have the advantage of reading ahead - there’s a whole chapter on stability antipatterns - but I think it’s interesting that this statement focuses on data issues. I suppose compute-related failures are more obvious and visible: if you accidentally wrote code that contains an infinite loop or is otherwise inefficient it will be more readily caught in testing.
Mar 25, 2025 6:36 am