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Wade Womersley

wade.one

wade womersley – york based software engineer

Engineering notes from the sharp end

Practical writing about software, systems, delivery, and things that behave strangely under pressure.

wade womersley – york based software engineer I write the way I work: direct, useful, and more interested in what holds up in production than what sounds clever on a slide.

308 published posts

Latest update October 31, 2026

Programming Random Stuff Software Engineer News AI Software

Latest post

Halloween Sweets Deserve Their Own Trading Floor

October 31, 2026 By Wade

A mixed bag of Halloween sweets is a small economy waiting to happen.

Food Random Stuff
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Archive

Recent writing

The First Round of a Board Game Is a Practice Round

Posted on October 30, 2026 By
Gaming, Random Stuff

I am strongly in favour of declaring the first round of a board game a practice round.

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A Database Constraint Can Close the Gap Between Checking and Writing

Posted on October 29, 2026 By
Programming

Checking whether a record exists before inserting another one does not guarantee uniqueness.

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Old Game Manuals Made the Journey Home Part of the Game

Posted on October 28, 2026 By
Gaming

A proper game manual could get the adventure going before the game had even started.

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Verify Webhook Signatures Before Parsing Away the Evidence

Posted on October 27, 2026 By
Programming

A webhook can contain perfectly sensible JSON and still fail signature verification.

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Request IDs Are Useful When They Survive the Whole Journey

Posted on October 26, 2026 By
Programming

A request ID in one log line is useful.

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A Giant Wolf in the Coffee Queue Is Peak Convention

Posted on October 26, 2026 By
Random Stuff

One of my favourite things about furry conventions is how quickly the wonderfully ridiculous starts to look normal.

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Feature Flags Need a Removal Plan

Posted on October 25, 2026 By
Software Engineer

A temporary feature flag is very good at becoming a permanent piece of the application.

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A Test Should Be Able to Disagree With the Implementation

Posted on October 23, 2026 By
Software Engineer

A test that repeats the implementation can pass while proving very little.

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Halloween Is Better With One Deeply Silly Decoration

Posted on October 23, 2026 By
Random Stuff

My favourite sort of Halloween decoration is the one that has wandered slightly away from being scary.

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