Peter Hilton

@hilton.org.uk

925 Followers 505 Following

Product manager @JetBrains, based in 🇳🇱 Rotterdam • speaker, writer, and musician • blogs software product management/design/development at https://hilton.org.uk/blog/

A Parisian street with a hanging cafe sign that shows the text ‘Le Loir dans la Théière’ and a picture of a dormouse in a teapot
A large patch of red, yellow and blue tulips, and other flowers, with the Euromast in the background skyline
A concrete and red-neon sandwich bar’s takeaway window, with someone standing facing it in a winter coat, hood up and hands in pockets
Use opposites precisely (presentation slide) Consistently use opposites in standard pairs. Typical pairs include: start/stop, begin/end, old/new, next/previous, source/destination, target/source, open/close, show/hide, insert/delete, get/release, increment/decrement, fetch/send, create/destroy ☹️ first / end 😀 first / last
A harbour in the city of Rotterdam on a sunny day, with moored barges, trees and benches in the foreground, and tall buildings and the Euromast in the background
8-part choral sheet music on a music stand, during a rehearsal, with conductor in the background
Bare trees on the path next to the river Rotte, on a sunny autumn day
A white plastic dental soft pick, with a green brush tip with tiny soft bristles
Tonny Garić Standing in front of a conference presentation slide, with the text ‘HTTP 200 🤡K’
River bridge lanes in the Netherlands, from left-to-right: bus lane, road, two-way cycle path (red tarmac)
Central London street with a bus stop island next to the bus lane, and a separated cycle path between bus stop and pavement
Train station: platform sign reads ‘Acton Main Line’
‘The Theory & Practice of Gamesmanship (Or, The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating)’, by Stephen Potter
One-upmanship, by Stephen Potter - ‘how to win life‘s little games without appearing to try’
Gojko Adzic on stage with a slide titled ‘Lizard optimisation’
Map of line m2 of Lausanne Métro and its stations (Ocmey, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
A gingerbread house (lebkuchenhaus)
Laila Borgia on the main stage, shown on big screens, with a large standing audience
Einar Høst on stage with the title slide: ‘A Meeting of Zombies’
Rotterdam skyline view with skyscrapers and the river Maas in the foreground, and the Willemsbrug bridge
Weather app screenshot showing 15℃ after 18:00, with a daytime max temperature of 16℃
Booster conference name badge. Text reads: my name is Peter Hilton, I am inspired by ‘wasting’ time in cafes
Einar on stage with slide that reads ‘The Sock Puppet’
Kristin Wolff and Anne Høymyr on stage; presentation title slide reads ‘Unpredictable, Unavoidable, Unstoppable’
I'm speaking at Booster conference 2025: Zero-bug policy success, Peter Hilton
Cartoon with Perl-style swearing symbols in the speech bubbles
% Arabica Kyoto, a stylish coffee bar
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.’ Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
Summary of naming things badly Meaningless: foo Vague: data Verbose: text_correction_by_editor Abbreviated: acc Diluted: order_invoice_document_file CRUDdy: address_updated Wrong: shipment (when it was really an order)
‘What’s in a name? 
That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet’ Romeo and Juliet, W. Shakespeare
Anakin: be in the office once a week because face-to-face is better Padme: so I don’t need to bring my laptop, right?
View from the top-deck front seat of the bus, on the coast road with beach and sea to the right
This post on my feed, next to Very British Problems posting ‘I meant to tidy the house today but I've accidentally just looked at my phone for 8 hours instead.’
English tea room interior, with cafe name ‘The Lighthouse’ on the wall, along with many lighthouse pictures and sculptures
macOS Notes release notes: ‘Maths in Notes. Type an expression into your note to have it solve automatically. You can also find notes you created in the Calculator app in the new Maths Notes folder.’
Starbucks receipt for two cappuccinos, priced at ¥1456 plus 10% tax, total ¥1601
The Brave browser’s settings menu, with the ‘About Brave’ menu item in barely legible low-contrast text that doesn’t meet WCAG accessibility guidelines
A flooded section concrete path with a detour churned to mud on the adjacent grass
A narrow side street with windmill in the background
Samosa spices and vegetable filling in separate pans
Ships moored on, and skyscrapers surrounding, the river Maas in Rotterdam
Book cover: Word Annoyances - how to fix the most annoying things about your favourite word processor
Web page form with a field labelled ‘Prename, Surname’
Christmas trees, many lights, and illuminated reindeer jumping through oval portals
A bowl of rich, dark mushroom curry, with beans and rice
Janna and Peter in a Brighton cafe
Hen with two eggs sculpture in Rotterdam, the Netherlands
A Notion code block showing Mermaid graph syntax in split view, with the code and a minimal opportunity solution tree preview
Illustration of the Erasmus Bridge, Rotterdam, by Koen van den Broek
Lao Gan Ma crispy chilli oil on slices of mature Dutch cheese on two slices of toast, on a plate
Road sign to Bergen in front of an entirely flat landscape
A bowl of ice cream with smoked bacon sprinkles, and slices of striped sponge cake
A plate of deconstructed Dutch ‘stamppot’ - greens, potatoes, bacon, and gravy - ready to mix up
A bowl of pea and ham soup, garnished with sour cream and cress
Looking South at the top of the Pyramidenkogel tower in Carinthia, Austria
View of clouds forest and lake, East from the top of the Pyramidenkogel tower in Carinthia, Austria