Chilterns and Thames Valley

In drifting snow

Distance: 5.25 miles
Ascent: 155 metres
Duration: 1 hour 35 minutes

Walk 10: Aston Hill and Drayton Beauchamp

It's nearly April and we've not logged a single walk yet this year. Time to remedy that.

It's nearly April, and within half an hour of starting today's walk we were ankle-deep in snow drifts in south-east England.

These two facts are clearly related.

Walking has also taken a back seat due to an ill-advised bit of DIY leading to discomfort in my back and leg. I'm on the mend now, and today's stroll up and down a Chiltern Hill, followed by a mile or two alongside a disused canal was the perfect reintroduction to getting outdoors.

Tech

On "coding"

"Have any of the three of you ever written any code?" asked Stephen Barclay, Member of Parliament for North-East Cambridgeshire on 13 March towards the end of the Public Accounts Committee hearing on "UK Cyber Security".

I think it was Ken McCallum, Head of Cyber Security, BIS Department who nodded and replied "yeah", implying that back when studying his mathematics degree he had once or twice instructed a computer to do something.

The question saddened me more than the answer, especially considering that the answer was met with a murmur of approval.

Coding has become big news. "Everyone needs to code" is a mantra that has grown tiring. Today I remembered what this was reminiscent of - the mass off-shoring of technology jobs. India, it was said, was full of people who could "code". By sending these low-value jobs off-shore, the UK could "move up the value chain" and keep the "design" and "architect" roles.

And yet I've met a fair few so-called "technical architects" who take pride in their ignorance at "coding". Perhaps they fear stooping down to that level.

You just can't separate coding from engineering. It's akin to asking a surgeon, "Do you cut?". Just as you'd expect a surgeon to do much more than wield a scalpel, so a software engineer needs to understand far more than how to code.

I hope soon the debate will move on, and look at the wider skills shortage. We don't need massed ranks of code-monkeys. We need engineers.