Blog

Why I don't use WhatsApp

2025-11-05T14:19:46+11:00

Quick summary: because Meta (a.k.a. Facebook) has been loading malware onto Android devices in order to spy on users.

In the past year I've (finally!) deleted my Facebook account, and have never used Instagram. The only remaining Meta product I've used has been Whatsapp, because it's being used by friends, family, and some of my kids' groups. I justified it because it'd be just too difficult to contact those people, tell them why I was leaving, and - in the case of my family - migrate them to another service.

Reading this in the news has changed my mind, however:

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

"Port tracking tech" means, in this case, installing malware on your phone to snoop on your browsing habits in other apps, regardless of your privacy settings ð

From the above article:

Security researchers say Meta and Yandex used native Android apps to listen on localhost ports, allowing them to link web browsing data to user identities and bypass typical privacy protections.

So I'm getting in touch with all the people I chat with on WhatsApp, explaining why I'm leaving, and pointing them to better services where I can be reached (like Signal and Mattermost).

Friends don't let friends use Meta.

The NSW Property Council and RTO Mandates

2025-11-05T14:19:46+11:00

Salary sacrifice by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free.

Some organisations that were perfectly content to embrace working from home during the pandemic are moving to mandated RTO (return to office). This is happening despite the fact that numerous studies show working from home increases productivity.

So, what gives? Why would employers give up a significant uptick in productivity, along with the recruiting benefits WFH offers?

Many reasons are given, but it turns out a significant factor here in Australia is lobbying by commercial real estate interests:

In August, developer lobby group the Property Council and its ally, Business Western Sydney, hailed themselves victorious in tipping the governmentâs hand in forcing public servants back into the office.

So if your job can be done remotely, and you're wondering why you're being forced back to the office, please remember that your time, money, and well-being are being sacrificed to prop up the portfolios of these companies, among others.

Local work

2025-11-05T14:19:46+11:00

Turned Off Laptop Computer", by Ken Tomita.

Today I was writing an internal blog post for a client, and was struck by the fact that we in the IT industry have our terminology backwards when it comes to work.

Years ago, my wife and I decided years ago to live in the Dandenong Ranges - initially Upwey, then Belgrave. It's a wonderful place to raise a family. Our eldest child (seven, nearly eight years old) can ride the train a couple of stops and walk home by himself, we have chickens and dogs, and a large back garden for the kids to play in. We could never have afforded any of this in a more central location, and the greenery is amazing.

Of course, this comes at a cost. Depending up on the location of my current client, I commute between fifty minutes to an hour on average, each way. Because we live in the future, that's not wasted time; I can work, read, communicate, and learn on the train. But it's a long hike. And I'm not alone; many of my colleagues live a similar distance from the city, and their commutes are sometimes longer (we're located conveniently close to a station).

The thing that struck me is that we refer to this state of affairs as work. When we stay home, eschewing the commute for collaboration over digital media, we say we're engaging in remote work.

That's the terminology I think we have backwards.

Commuting several hours a day to get to an office many kilometers from our homes: that's remote. When it's not practical for a moderately fit person to walk or cycle to work: that's remote.

In contrast, I propose that we call working in or nearby to our homes local work.

The positive connotations are intentional; if there's one upside to the otherwise dreadful COVID-19 pandemic, it's that it's taught us that many IT jobs are mostly or entirely compatible with local work. And for those of us who commute to work in open plan offices there's a double benefit, as open plan offices have shown to be uniformly bad for productivity, creativity, and even health.

I propose that we start using the term local work immediately, in the hopes that it will become more widely accepted as a default in our industry, and not just something we do in times of crisis.

Originally posted on LinkedIn in 2020.

On the incentives behind returning to the CBD

2025-11-05T14:19:46+11:00

"Lemmings" by Sascha Kohlmann is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Recently, there's been a lot of focus in the news on people returning to the office in the Melbourne CBD. For example, from Melbourne CEOs push Andrews on office return:

NAB chief executive Ross McEwan, Newcrest Mining CEO Sandeep Biswas and several top bosses are urging employees to return to the office as soon as safely possible, as business groups ramp up pressure under a Melbourne plan for a 20 per cent return, or one day a week per worker.

Many of us working in large CBD-based companies are experiencing this urging, right now, as our employers roll out plans to 'encourage' or 'support' workers in a part-time return to the CBD.

My personal position on hybrid working is nuanced. I'm an 'extroverted introvert' according to my psychologist; I value working with people in meatspace, despite knowing that often there's no efficiency benefit to doing so. I also recognize that it's quite possible to perform many roles well entirely remotely, and some not at all.

An approach that several of the delivery teams I've worked with have chosen - when given the option! - is to meet up in the office on a sprint / iteration / release cadence, but otherwise to work remotely. With sensible remote-first practices in the office to avoid accidentally excluding anyone, this seems to work pretty well.

But these concerns are unrelated to the actual incentive behind the push for 2 - 3 days in CBD offices: many small businesses based in the CBD are dying since the growth in remote work. The messaging is consistent from CEOs ...

This is exactly what we need to support the small businesses that serve our CBD and allows employers like NAB to plan with certainty as we rebound from the pandemic. - Ross McEwan

... through to City Councillors ...

The City of Melbourne is stepping up its commitment to have staff return safely to the office as a critical step to support city businesses. ... "I'm encouraging all other city employers to consider the benefits for their teams of bringing workers back to the city office and the huge impact for bringing Melbourne back." - Jason Chang

Credit to them for being transparent, but let's be really clear about this: people whose roles can be performed mostly or fully remotely are being pressured to return to the CBD on a regular basis, in order to subsidize businesses who rely on their money.

This comes with a great personal cost to workers. Looking at my own rough numbers, if I'm coming in to the city 3 days per week for 48 weeks, I will be spending more than $16,500 on after school care, 288 hours (!) commuting, plus car and train costs for park and ride. That's an immense cost, both in terms of dollars, but most importantly precious time! Time I could be spending with my family, relaxing, or learning new skills.

Personally, I plan to embrace hybrid working because it works for me. Not three days per week, I imagine, but certainly more than zero :) But that's my choice, and I respect the choice of those whose roles don't require physical presence in the office, and who would prefer to work mostly or entirely remotely.

The thing is, the expectation that people will be in the office (especially remote city offices) 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, is no longer correct for many roles. That will have a huge impact upon CBD businesses - not just those at the retail and service coalface, but also on property owners. Taking just one example, I imagine that the true market value of retail real estate in the CBD has plummeted in the past few years.

But demanding that individuals sacrifice their time, money, and happiness in an attempt to unwind the clock won't work. In addition to being unfair, it will cause huge retention problems for companies competing for talent, and will only worsen the inevitable market adjustment.

Businesses that try to sacrifice the well-being of their staff to subsidize their customers will find that in the long term, they'll lose both.

Originally posted on LinkedIn in 2022.

The Atkinson Hyperlegible Font

2025-11-05T14:19:46+11:00

After some deliberation, I've decided to use the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font for this site.

The font itself is great. Clean, easy to read, and reasonably small at a couple of hundred KiB - and free to use courtesy its creator, the Braille Institute.

The reason for my deliberation is that including the font significantly increases the size of this site upon first load - around doubling it. But I decided that it was worth the extra bandwidth to have a hyperlegible font available regardless of whether it'd been preinstalled on the client.

If you happen to benefit from a hyperlegible font, I'd love to hear from you, & learn which approach you find suits you better.

Introduction - and, Why Halp?

2025-11-05T14:19:46+11:00

This is my new home on the Web, where I'll be blogging about aspects of my work and profession that I think will be of interest.

Some topics I'm planning to cover in the future include:

Doing more with less. With many companies right now looking to cut costs and avoid hiring, how can teams achieve more with fewer people and less money to spend on SaaS and cloud? Spoiler alert: building the right things as simply as possible. But it's not easy culturally or politically.
Estimation isn't free. Thoughts on the estimation of software projects, and why so many companies seem to want to trade pace of delivery for predictability of delivery - and achieve neither.
Simplicity is table stakes for Agile. In particular, the values of "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation" and "Responding to change over following a plan" are very hard to achieve if you don't work hard to keep your architeture as simple as possible (but no simpler!). Be Grug Brained.

I've moved my personal stuff - projects, hobbies, photography, and mental meanderings - onto Gemini, at duncan.bayne.id.au. Gemini is more fun for personal stuff, and lets me create a clean separation between topics of interest to professional software developers and managers, and ... everything else ð.

Why Halp?

You might have noticed that the new site layout is pretty spartan. Instead of a hamburger menu at the top, there's just a link to a menu in the footer ... and there, there's a link back up to the top of the page. This isn't my idea; I've shamelessly stolen it from Brad Taunt.

But the software running this site is my own. It's Free Software, written in Perl 5, and very much a work in progress. Currently it serves up Websites using a simple templating system, with generated RSS feeds. Soon it'll serve up my Gemini capsule, too, in a similar fashion. Once I've run it for a while, and I've tidied up and documented things sufficiently, I'll do an actual release.

The choice to write my own Web and Gemini ~~server~~ software might be seen as a little strange, as might my choice of language (especially given my love of Common Lisp). As I explain in the Halp README, I have several goals for the project:

Long-lived. Ideally, it'll last me for at least a decade, maybe more.
Highly portable. I don't want to be tied to the "big three" of macOS, GNU/Linux, and Windows - Plan 9 is still on my radar for the future.
Safe. This means, e.g., not having to roll my own crypto or template libraries.
Not a Google product.

This led me to a pretty short shortlist:

Having spent a few years as a professional C coder I'm reluctant to reach for it for any text-heavy task. rc is okay but I don't find it terribly easy to read - I struggled a bit with Werc. That left ... Perl!

Updated 2024-04-20: I wound up building Halp as a static generator, instead, after deciding that my time would be better spent not implementing a bunch of fun but time-consuming Web server features.