The bike. This year, like last year, I am doing a cycle challenge for the month of October. Last year I undertook the challenge in the name of Cancer Research UK, and was successful in raising quite a bit of money for the cause. ...
Vibe-Coding is a mood. Things change FAST in the vibe-coding world. Last time I posted here on the subject, I was using the ‘Zed’ vibe coding editor . This was only a month or so ago! Agent Harness Today, my current setup is using the ‘Pi’ commandline agentic harness with Deepseek-Flash-v4. ...
The really bad thing. In around July 2026, a REALLY bad thing happened. My home network got hacked. I had to take extensive recovery steps, including securing and changing all passwords, COMPLETELY rebuilding the home server and network, and restoring 18TB of backup archives from Amazon AWS Deep Glacier (which cost me approx £2000). ...
Put yourself in his position. Let’s not split straws here, you can’t have honestly have got to adulthood without realising the world is - quite simply - NOT a good place, and it is getting worse by the moment. So it is natural therefore that people are increasingly not wanting to interact with it, especially young people, as they do not see the point. ...
The road ahead. After a lot of thought, I have decided on a career strategy. I still think my main strength is, and always will be, my technical skills. I am going to keep improving those, on the job and off the job. I DO need to learn additional ‘soft skills’ - the main one being presentation skills - I need to get comfortable presenting my technical development/research in front of an audience. This is a skill that will be needed even in the most hardcore of technical fields, such as research labs - you still need to present your findings. ...
Neurospicy! Because both my wife and I are neurodiverse, we have researched and invested heavily into assistive technology to help us with our ‘quirky’ natures. We are very lucky to be able to have the luxury to live a lifestyle that both allows, and allows us to afford, these adaptions. A huge percentage of the neurodiverse population are simply not so fortunate - and suffer because of it. ...
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. ...