[blog] April 2026 A trip to Toronto (covered in more depth in another post). Cataracts are gone, replaced by EDoF lenses. OpenWrt upgrades got easy (including NoPorts). Gemini Pro; and the usual pupdate and solar diary (including figuring out too late that iBoost isn't worth it).

[blog] Toronto Toronto is a fantastic city, with plenty to keep us entertained over our 6 night stay.

A vetting primer you say? Here you go www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/go...

brilliant post: "If you’ve been building systems with clear documentation, explicit context, and strong communication norms, AI amplifies that. If you’ve been deferring it, hoping tooling would eventually solve it, AI exposes that—faster and more visibly than anything before."

Best swag ever :) #GDE #Lego

I am -- as @adamhjk.me predicts -- firmly in what he calls "camp two", but this delightfully bonkers piece is very much worth reading.

Aaargh! I thought the Met had binary search explained to them but they are STILL using this excuse!!! onodi.co/bisect/

Energy abundance is coming. Thank fuck because fossil fuel geopolitics is the absolute worst. Well played China.

[blog] March 2026 Bath Half Marathon (not me running), AI training, QCon and Monki Gras conferences, USB shaver chargers, and the usual pupdate and solar diary.

I wrote something: sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/03...

There's a long, bad journalistic tradition: All conservative grass-roots political movements are fascinating heartland phenomena, all progressive grass-roots political movements are ineffectual bleating. This one is written off as powered by white female college grads--the wine-moms slur, basically.

This is... worth a read. Even if he is a Labour MP. He is, in fact, my MP too. Always willing to listen

Why are UK universities in such trouble? It's a complex story. I try to get to the bottom of it in this month's Prospect. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/pol...

[blog] QCon London 2026 QCon is one of my favourite events, and I've been to a lot of them over the years. 2026 was the best yet, so kudos to the programme committee and C4media organisers.

[blog] Monki Gras 2026 #monkigras 2026 was the best Monki Gras so far with a theme of ‘prepping craft’. A room full of techies, and a great gathering of friends, but not really a tech conference. It’s transcended tech, and become the place where the talks are about more important stuff.

Have Brussels experience? Work with me (and my awesome colleagues). @eff.org is hiring an Assistant Director of EU Policy to co-lead our legal advocacy and lobby efforts across European institutions to protect digital rights. www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.p...

I wrote a few lines about my development setup (which - by accident, not by design - mitigates a good number of risks associated with vibecoding. Not all of them, but many.) addxorrol.blogspot.com/2026/03/slig...

GB News has become our very own Fox News – with all of the problematic partisan politics that comes with it. So what happened to the watchdog which is supposed to protect us? Great article written for the Independent by Alan Rusbridger. @arusbridger.bsky.social

The Flutter team is hiring! 💙 docs.flutter.dev/jobs

The biggest change in software development is not AI code, but a permission structure for disregarding quality in the pursuit of velocity

I spent 8 years at hashtag#DEC watching the deal get worse. At first I thought it was just the economy. Then I reverse-engineered what was actually happening. It was a deliberate strategy. And I think you're going to see it again. New post: www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03...

Announcing Genkit Dart (Preview) ✨ Build high-quality AI apps that run anywhere 📱💻 In this release: ✅ Support for Gemini, Claude, OpenAI ✅ Type-safe AI flows ✅ Dev UI for AI testing and traces ✅ Run code on client or server Read the blog → blog.dart.dev/announcing-g...

I started a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patternw guide about anti-patterns - things NOT to do So far I only have one: Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators, aka dumping a thousand line PR without even making sure it works first simonwillison.net/guides/agent...

Somebody did TiddlyWiki, but with Markdown

[blog] February 2026 I find out that I have a cataract; 2nd Shingrix vaccination, protest (and counter-protest) at a Humanists event, a visit to the British Museum, Clay Hunt VR might finally be improving my clays in real life (despite the cataract). Along with the usual pupdate and solar diary.

I built a programming language you're not supposed to read, veralang.dev. Vera is designed for machines to write. No variable names. No style choices. Compiler errors are instructions for the model, not diagnostics for you. Go and point a model at it, negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/28/a....

Did the liquid glass people at Apple take their inspiration from Douglas Adams and the Disaster Area stunt ship? “Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it.”

it’s so part of every day life that I don’t think we interrogate enough the ideological underpinnings of “data driven” and people’s positive connotation of that phrase

When the Right Wing squeaks in, it's a mandate and a true cultural shift. When the Left wins it's an aberration that we need not pay attention to.

[blog] Publishing apt and yum/dnf repos on GitHub Pages Following on from my post about creating .deb and .rpm packages with nFPM, this looks at how to host those packages on GitHub Pages based apt and yum/dnf repos.

"Just as there are clouds and clowns, there are hyperscalers and mere scalers of hype. Amazon’s and Microsoft’s incremental CAPEX in 2025 is each roughly on par with hype scaler Oracle’s lifetime CAPEX."

[blog] Packaging Dart binaries as .deb and .rpm etc. nFPM makes it very easy to put your binaries into a Debian .deb or RedHat Package Manager .rpm file. I also took the opportunity to slide in the new(ish) Dart cross compilation capabilities rather than using Dockerised build for arm7 and riscv64.

Kent Beck at @yowconf.bsky.social Sydney: nobody knows what programming will look like in two years — "even getting to 'it depends' would be progress." If you're feeling anxious or grief-stricken about where our industry is heading, I wrote this for you. 👉 leaddev.com/ai/nobody-kn...

My lovely friend @santoshyadav.dev included some of my words and thoughts on to his 'Contribute to open source - acomprehensive guide for everyone' resource with my experiences and tips on contributing as a designer to open source www.santoshyadav.dev/blog/contrib...

Which doesn't indicate that coding agents aren't useful. They obviously are super useful. My read is that it indicates the obvious fact that software development velocity is dominated by factors other than the writing of code itself.

Fortunately @juderogers.bsky.social and @thequietus.com are here to put Edge of Darkness into perspective. 🙏 thequietus.com/opinion-and-...

Who do I know that’s at Container Days London today?

"The valley and the monomyth," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Every pitch deck is a Hero's Journey. Silicon Valley's greatest export isn't technology, nit's storytelling. The facts don't change the world. The stories do. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/09/t...

So many developers have sent me that Anthropic skills/mastery case study that I realized I should ungate what I *already wrote* about this: beginning principles to design workflows that work *with* your mind, not against it, & protect your problem-solving www.fightforthehuman.com/cognitive-he...

"...we're now operating in the slopocene, where people don't care about prior art because they can get their model to barf it up on demand; like little chicks being fed by mother owl." Me just now in a Signal chat.

What fresh hell is this? I'm guessing the GitHub PM for Discussions has a number to make, and the only way to do that is dark patterns 🤦‍♂️ #e14n

AI slop is ripping up the social contract between maintainers and contributors essential to open source development. Practitioners have been repeatedly assured that AI would supercharge their communities, but so far that hasn’t been the case. redmonk.com/kholterhoff/...

[blog] January 2026 Mixer repair, skiing in Les Arcs, Burns night at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, and the usual pupdate and solar diary.

[blog] Skiing in Paradiski (Les Arcs 2000)

@cstross.bsky.social #HaltingState

I was totally unfamiar with the term Brownian Ratchet, and now it's basically come to rule my life. Thanks multiclaude :) www.distributedthoughts.org/brownian-rat...

The Shingles vaccine has outperformed all expectations. Why? erictopol.substack.com/p/spotlight-...

[blog] Agentic Product Development and Theory of Constraints Coding is no longer the constraint. It's now cheaper than ever to make software. But there are supply side constraints on innovation, and getting apps to market. There's also a demand side constraint on adoption in an attention economy ...

AI is moving fast. For leaders, the question isn’t just what can AI do? It’s how do we do it safely? Find my full article here → https://matthewskelton.com/blog/designing-ai-enabled-apps-for-minimal-harm-a-mandate-for-senior-leaders