DavidCraddock.net

The problem I have with full-stack engineers is that they are - usually - rubbish champions for the user. True, proper, UX&D has unfortunately fallen by the wayside in many technical products, and it is a difficult and extremely skilled specialisation in its own right, and its practitioners should be respected and treated as such. The absence of real strong UX&D skillsets on software products have directly led to the ‘Enshitification’ of technical products, and made just about every NORMAL person HATE systems that are seemingly designed (or mis-designed) to frustrate them! This is not good for the industry, this is not good for profits, and this is especially not good for society. ...

German quality standards don’t lie. Most people in the Western world get through life on a raft of excuses, lies, manipulation, charm, politics, half-finished promises, half-baked ideas and crappy work. If you actually DO a job task to the best of your ability, and make the result EXCELLENT - this is not called ‘perfectionism’ - this is called ‘doing a good job’. ...

I have just had a thought about a subject I want to explore: “Test Automation-Directed Gen-AI Assisted Software Development”: A process and workflow for rapid single-engineer AI-assisted development of software while keeping control over quality, alignment and direction - aka “TIDAS”. Yes. I know most developers thought/wished that test automation was ‘dead and buried’. But it’s really NOT, and it’s never been more useful than it is today in the world of GenAI coding agents that hallucinate and cannot be 100% trusted to deliver what is asked for, because of alignment problems, training problems, overwhelming incentives to take unhelpful ‘short cuts’, et al. ...

Blogs have been around for a very long time. Some people would say that is a good thing. Weblogs (‘Blogs’) Blogs are definitely a “90’s phenomenon”. But for some people, this is actually still a really good thing. I have been keeping a blog of some form or other since the Geocities days. Having worked in customising blog engines professionally, and developing blogs for individuals using platforms such as Wordpress , from around 2006-2010, I have a long-standing attachment to blogging software and the medium. ...

The 90’s Emachine with a whole 64MB of RAM! I remember seeing these ‘EMachine ’ PCs in the late 90s. By then, I had been using computers since 1986, starting with a BBC Microcomputer . ...

Another mobile workbench. I have been completely ‘blown away’ by the excellent ‘Zed’ text editor . With Zed combined with the current ‘best value’ Chinese model, which for me is Deepseek v4 Pro , it is an amazing ‘power tool’ to make some much needed refactoring and further development to the open source projects I’ve been working on for literally.. decades. It is the closest replacement for VIM9 as my daily driver that I’ve EVER encountered.. and I have been using Vim for at least 20 years. ...

Dolby Codecs. Vibe-coded this script today (amongst other things). I am using it to go automate the process of going through my collection and create additional audio streams for files which have EAC 5.1 surround sound streams. Why? Because EAC3 audio is a Dolby propitiatory format and it doesn’t play on the Windows 11 Plex player. This means if EAC3 is the only English audio stream format available on the file I’ve downloaded, I won’t be able to play the file on Windows 11 in English. ...

The hypocrisy of the UK today.

An impressive-looking ant. I think where I’m going wrong is that I’m presuming that - as I increase my technical skills - I will become more employable as a tech worker. Unfortunately this is the opposite of what is actually happening. People hire for ’team fit’ - and usually they do NOT want someone who is particularly technically skilled. ...

AI has blown my mind. It’s true. 2 years ago I was a Luddite, lost and alone. Today, however, I embrace vibe-coding like nothing ever before. And I WILL call it ‘vibe-coding’ and I know it sounds derogatory, but you have to consider the fact that I learned how to program when the internet was not even ‘a thing’ - so I have honed my skills for decades. And I’m working on my fourth STEM degree. ...