Gareth HughesThoughts on software engineering, leadership, and technology.
Engineering metrics aren't something developers like to talk about. But there's growing pressure for businesses to have better insight into how engineering teams are performing, and it's a complicated subject — engineering performance can't be looked at in isolation. A Software.com Code Time Report based on data from over 250,000 developers found that the median developer spends just 52 minutes…
Using Claude as a First-Class Interface for Squirrel Notes When I built Squirrel Notes, the MCP integration wasn't part of the original plan. It came later, as a practical itch: I was already using Claude daily, I had a notes app I actually liked, and I kept context-switching between the two. The obvious fix was to connect them. What wasn't obvious was how to do it without undermining the entire…
How Squirrel Notes Keeps Your Data Private When I set out to build Squirrel Notes, the first requirement on my list wasn't sync, or markdown support, or even cost. It was this: I don't want my service to know anything about anything. That's a pretty blunt way to describe end-to-end encryption, but it captures the intent exactly. I'm building a notes app. I have no business reading your notes.…
How I build and released Squirrel Notes with Claude Code and Copilot. Use it for free at Squirrel Notes. !Squirrel Notes My first foray into AI-assisted software development Background As a currently hands-off engineering leader, I haven't had much real time during work hours to stay on top of AI software development — something that was starting to make me feel quite uncomfortable. The problem —…
In this post, I will outline processes that I believe will enhance your interviewing procedures. This is based on 20 years of experience, 10 of which have been in leadership roles involving interviewing. Keep it Short Unless you are Google or Amazon, candidates may not be specifically eager to work for you, so let's not pretend this is a prestigious opportunity. They are likely interviewing at…
The year 2026 marks my 20th anniversary as a Software Developer. I started in 2006 at a company called TechnoPhobia in Sheffield. My interview process there was interesting, to say the least. I was hired from a set of 2nd-year university students because I was one of the nerdiest-looking ones. I don’t actually remember much about that interview other than being warned by my housemate at the time…
!musictutorsofsydney.org Predicatably I haven’t blogged much in the last year. Just pushing this update on a small side project I recently completed - https://musictutorsofsydney.org/. It’s suprisingly easy to create a fairly complex website entirely free with Jekyll on github pages. The only thing you actually need to pay for is the domain name.…
This was originally going to be a presentation I put together for work, but I shelved that for now and decided to create a blog post with roughly the same content. Images are, of course, courtesy of ChatGPT. My company (prior to me joining) embarked on the journey of trying to rebuild the core platform, and it did not go as planned. Here, I will outline why this is so often the case and suggest…
I previously worked for A-League, and during my time there we launched aleagues.com.au and migrated all the club websites to a WordPress platform developed by a third party. The system we inherited had a set of APIs deployed into AWS. Games, Teams, and Competitions were imported from a third-party provider via EventBridge and a series of Lambdas. The data was stored in MongoDB, then surfaced via…