I really enjoyed this Lex Fridman podcast on VLC, FFmpeg, etc and all things video. One needs to be reminded occasionally how incredible open source is.

I recently read J B Priestley's English Journey. A fascinating tour of England in 1933. owlbadger.com/posts/2026-0...

Guitar Dashboard gets dark mode! Thanks for Elon Gliksberg for the excellent PR. guitardashboard.com

Gemini is very nice about guitardashboard.com:

Inside the front cover of a recently published book. Rather embarrassing :)

New blog post: Running individual Bun tests with Zed tasks https://mikehadlow.com/posts/2026-04-15-running-individual-bun-tests-with-zed-tasks/

Currently working on adding pentatonic scales to Guitar Dashboard. It's a tricky one because of the huge range of chords that work with them. My current approach is to find all diatonic modes that are the superset of the pentatonic and display the chords of those modes as concentric rings.

New look menu for Guitar Dashboard. The old-style text now replaced by icons and the scale family drop down moved to the control panel, which means that the current scale type is now visible. guitardashboard.com

Guitar Dashboard now has sound. It's been too long coming. Now you can hear scales, modes, and chords without having to reach for your guitar. guitardashboard.com

"But software is mostly a thing people use, and getting people to use things is not a building problem. It never was." www.joanwestenberg.com/the-hacker-n...

Our local chalk stream. Crystal clear water, but very cold. It's a very popular wild swimming spot. That pool is about 5ft deep.

I've got OpenClaw running on Ubuntu server on an old 2011 MacBook Pro. At last a great use for old laptops.

Now working on adding sound to Guitar Dashboard. I've chosen the smplr library for this. It's super easy to get going. Sound in the browser has come a long way from when I first looked at this back in 2018. github.com/danigb/smplr

Guitar Dashboard get the ultimate upgrade today: rounded corners. guitardashboard.com "Round corners are everywhere" - Steve Jobs

A new colour palette for Guitar Dashboard. guitardashboard.com

A couple of days late, but this April fool video by the brilliant Kenny Gioia is top notch. It had me fuming for a minute or two before I clocked it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGCT...

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher at the British Museum yesterday.

I've been further down the Linux rabbit hole over the last few days configuring cachyos.org with hyprland. After my excellent experience with Omarchy I decided I just needed to do it all myself. Lots of fun so far.

My next plan with Guitar Dashboard is to replace D3Js with my own hand-crafted SVG library. "We do it not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."

I just added "C Standard" tuning to Guitar Dashboard after a request from Steve Spencer. He says: "It's a tuning that is quite popular in desert rock, doom, metal, and various other genres." 🤘

I'm gradually moving settings on Guitar Dashboard from the menu-bar to gear icons on the actual components they relate to. For now you get both ways of changing settings, but the menu ones will dissapear at some point.

From mid-April I'll be back on the market looking for work. - 25+ years professional experience. - .NET since the start, Node 3+ years. - See mikehadlow.com/top/about/ for details. - Contract or perm. Slight preference for contract. - Must be remote. (I'm UK based).

The Joseph Wright exhibition at the National Gallery is small but superb. IMO he should be counted alongside Turner and Constable as one of the English greats.

I really am going to live _forever_ :)

This looks super useful for Google Workspace agent automation: github.com/googleworksp...

I'm really into all the crazy innovation happening with AI coding, but at the same time I _really_ enjoy old-skool fingers-on-the-keyboard coding. It's such a satisfying pastime. I see myself craft-coding for fun long after I'm simply an AI-herder in my day job.

Excellent post by @minimaxir.bsky.social. It seems as though "re-write everything in Rust" is now possible with AI 😀 minimaxir.com/2026/02/ai-a...

This website appears to publish system prompts for common AI tools. Here's the one for Claude Code (but is it legit?). github.com/x1xhlol/syst...

Need information overload? Here's an AI powered world monitor: worldmonitor.app

I dug an old Raspberry Pi 2 out of the cupboard and repurposed it as a desk clock. I'm using the excellent wtfutil and my own custom clock generator for the TUI. Endless tinkering fun!

Very much enjoying the YIMBY podcast with @jamesomalley.co.uk Learning why nothing gets built in this country. (It's bats).

New blog post: Book Review: Vibe Coding by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge https://mikehadlow.com/posts/2026-02-23-vibe-coding/

Chris Lattner has an excellent post reflecting on agentic code generation and what it means for the future of software engineering. An excellent, and optimistic, read.

Good post from @simonwillison.net on how vital TDD is for agentic coding. I tend to implement functions that throw a "not implemented" exception, rather than have the tests fail thanks to the missing SUT in the red phase. simonwillison.net/guides/agent...

Verily the finest thread thoust may read this day!

I just became aware of Tauri, a lightweight cross-platform desktop app framework written in Rust to host your HMTL/JS/CSS application. It might be just what I need for a desktop Guitar Dashboard!

Andrej Karpathy coins yet another AI meme word "claw". As in "my claw just booked me a holiday in Spain." :)

Another great post from Dave Farley. How agentic code generation makes CI/CD even more essential. Shoutout to developing in main thrown in. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xavr...

Ok, so I wrote a very long and kinda personal thing about existential dread and the end of programming, and I'm not really sure I want to endure the discourse, but if you want to read it, it's here - gist.github.com/davidwhitney... It's like 6,000 words long, sorry.

A Bun based tiny desktop app platform. As an avid Bun user this is super interesting.

I just vibe coded a Git repo visualisation tool. Great fun. It took around 3 hours.

I've just been trying out @simonwillison.net's new CLI browser automation tool, Rodney (like the name). It's designed for agent automation. I created a Claude Skill for it, which works really well. Gist: gist.github.com/mikehadlow/2...

About a month ago I setup Omarchy on an 8 year-old Dell XPS 13 and I've been using it as my dev machine daily since then. So far it's been an excellent experience. I've barely scratched the surface, but I'm really enjoying the Hyprland window manager.

It's funny how thinking about software engineering in the age of AI has reminded me of the SOLID principles, collected in the early 2000s by Bob Martin: ...

"Cognitive Debt" - what happens when coding agents spew out code that you don't understand. I have first hand experience using Claude Code in a (new to me) legacy codebase and the Cognitive Debt is very real.

Two intriguing new tools from @simonwillison.net. Quite a rabbit hole to explore, including learning about Chrome Dev Tools.

Happy Valentines Day! Roses are red, But sometimes they're blue, If at great speed, They come towards you.

I just learnt about Eliyahu Goldratt and his theory of constraints: "Any improvement not made at the constraint is an illusion." (from the Vibe Coding book). Is speed of writing code your constraint? In much of software engineering I'd sugest it most certainly isn't.

A list of open source AI projects. OpenClaw currently No1 - no surprises there.

Really enjoying Chip Huyen's blog. Lot's of great AI related writing. (She's the author of Designing ML Systems).