sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: The Chi problem
date: 09-Oct-2025

The Chi problem

Much has been said about the word sometimes written as 'Chi' in English (pronounced the same as in the English word 'cheese'), corresponding to the Chinese character 氣. This character, pronounced 'chi' in Chinese, 'ki' in Japanese, 'khi' in Vietnamese, 'gi' in the Philippines etc and corresponding closely with the Indian word 'prana' is variously translated as 'energy' in the sense of vital life-force, or 'élan vitale' from the French.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Yang vs. Yang
date: 30-Sep-2025

Yang vs. Yang

I was recently asked why I practice violent, aggressive Tai Chi!

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: On Shu-Ha-Ri
date: 25-Oct-2024

On Shu-Ha-Ri

So, fairly regularly something turns up in my inbox relating to Shu-Ha-Ri (守破離) often quoted as a Japanese model of skills acquisition. These articles, blogs etc. are all problematic in some way or other, and inevitably as both an Aikido instructor and a career IT professional with deep experience of Software Development Methodologies, I will get asked what I think. Hmmm...

So, let's start with the Wikipedia article:

sleepyfox

Sustainable Development

This gist https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/61d4375aa1fcfad8cb0338edb4151546 URL shortened to https://tinyurl.com/fox-sustainable-development

About me

• Hello, I'm SleepyFox, Fox to my friends
• Mastodon: @sleepyfox@hachyderm.io
• You don't care who I am, you care about the content, so let's get straight to it
• All the content is online, and will be linked on every slide, so there's no need to take notes or screenshots, you can just relax and pay attention to the material.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Taiji Tennis
date: 08-Nov-2024

Taiji Tennis

So I read a bit about Tennis, and thought 'Hey, that sounds cool, I'd like to learn that', and looked around to see if there is a local Tennis club, and if there is a learners' group. Great news, I find a 'Learn Tennis' session run by a local instructor. They appear legit, are certified and insured by the Tennis Union of Great Britain, so I go down on Tuesday evening to the local sports centre and give it a go.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: The corruption of critical thinking
date: 05-Apr-2014
preamble: An open letter to Mr. Binstock and Dr. Dobbs addressing their recent editorial entitled "The Corruption of Agile" and its follow-up article addressing feedback from the community.

EDITED: 2024-10-29 in order to fix broken links and to use the Internet Archive in order to make available material which commercial publishers have egregiously removed - see Fox's 8th Law[^7]. Sadly it appears that my closing hope was not upheld over the intervening decade by the recipients.

Dear Mr. Binstock,

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: ObFOSScation
date: 15-Oct-2024

ObFOSScation - why FOSS means more than you think it does

The problem with #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is that everybody thinks they know what it means. I once spent a couple of years working on and off with Ross Gardler, a VP of the Apache Software Foundation and Manager of OSS-Watch in Oxford.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Why Aikido?
date: 09-Sep-2024

Why Aikido?

Aikido is:

• Fun

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Expertise and interviews
date: 23-Apr-2023

Expertise and interviews

In 2001 Paul Graham, founder of Startup Incubator Y Combinator wrote a blog post about LISP called 'Beating the averages'. I don't want to talk about LISP, or startups, not today anyway.

sleepyfox

author: @sleepyfox
title: Microservices Day
date: 12-May-2016

Microservices Day

On Tuesday NearForm put on their 'Microservices Day' free one-day single-track conference, which was actually better than many paid-for conferences that I've been to in the past. Not only was the quality of the presentations overall very good, but all of the (very professionally produced) videos are available on YouTube: