‘At the end of the day, he ran back into the office and shouted, "PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW CARS WORK, YOU GUYS."’

The 5 Stages of Tech Debt, a 🧵 (Based on a true story)

Something that not enough people know about SQLite is that it's in the public domain because it's a product of government. General Dynamics made it on contract with the U.S. Navy. When government software is affirmatively placed in the public domain, and the code is public, good things can happen!

#XKCD readers know what happened to #aws#xkcd... https://xkcd.com/908/

Rare example of an academic report written as clearly as an early GDS blog post. (And ‘Jeff Bezos doesn’t come around your house for a workshop every time you want to buy a book from Amazon’ is a great line.)

signin.account.gov.uk/terms-and-co... One for the GDS gang. These T’s & C’s need reviewing. Not least the section “Governing Law” which has an obvious issue when you read the Welsh version ;)

Passmore Edwards funded institutions for me.

Data standards for the spreadsheet infrastructure. Platforms can come later.

We're recruiting for a Bilingual Content Designer (Welsh and English) on our team, please spread the word to anyone who might be interested! www.jobtrain.co.uk/justicedigit...

Of all the things I hoped would cause riots before it was allowed to occur… who has allowed Paddington to close their M&S food hall without advance warning? It wasn’t great but the alternatives are so much worse. #firstworldproblems

My daughter is ten. Today she came back from school and told me that their class had elected a digital director.

“There is no person behind the language produced by a chatbot. It’s a dilution of billions of people, like adding water to sugar until the sweetness dissolves. Writing, & lots of art and other things humans do, can give you a bit of a taste of the someone behind it. With AI that sugar is rinsed out”

Book review, by me: Numbers and Nerves: Information, emotion and meaning in a world of data A fascinating collection of chapters on how people understand or fail to understand numbers www.effortmark.co.uk/book-review-...

Good Services are only as strong as their weakest link Services are impacted by everything our organisation does and how it operates. If something we're doing from a way we evaluate performance to how we fund services doesn't work, it will impact the end user Get this poster on good.services/shop

I spent seven years writing a book on this and she just… said it in three succinct paragraphs to politico.

Now at the stage in my career where I feel like writing the ‘there are only 7 plots in literature’ book, but for digital projects.

He died over 60 years ago, so he couldn’t have foreseen AI…

This is good. open.substack.com/pub/cutlefis...

That old adage from the early 70s that says that Ferrari can’t win in sports cars and F1 at the same time… looking like it might be true right now.

25 years ago, I was on the newsdesk of a big local daily newspaper when the News Ed took a phone call, beckoned me over, handed me the receiver and mouthed ‘find out who it is and whether there’s a story’. I’ve come to realise that answering those two questions is all that matters in most scenarios

Lando may not have won but ‘I did that once. On Mario Kart’ deserves an award of its own. Somewhere, Dan Ticktum is sitting thinking that he once got more than 10s for something similar.

The Chip of Theseus - glorious stuff from @louisashworth.bsky.social on.ft.com/4myxG6o

It’s Mary Anning’s birthday, so time to share @katebeaton.bsky.social’s brilliant cartoon again.

Have just made my first custom granola mixture. Officially middle aged now.

Had some pretty substandard olfactory travel experiences over the years but this train is a bit like walking up to the rancid wheelie bin outside a burger bar at a festival, opening it and then jumping right in and closing the lid.

This week’s product idea: resilience for working in digital roles as a service. Every week, a random fellow digital professional contacts you, asks if you’ve thought about running away to join the circus this week and then tells you that you’re doing good work and asking the right questions.

Spotify has sent me a countdown to a new album release. Thrilled to see Antonin Dvorak is letting me know that he’s releasing new material despite the fact that he’s (checks notes) 184 years old. He hasn’t sent me the chance to buy the limited edition Vinyl or the T-shirt - maybe that’s next week.

Come work with my brilliant little team and be a Welsh and English Bilingual Senior Content Designer! www.jobtrain.co.uk/justicedigit...

Hadn’t seen this track listing in a few decades but, now found, I am forced to face the genesis of my questionable taste in music. (Purchased from WHSmith Swansea bargain bin with my Christmas vouchers - does that count as ‘your own money? - in 1985, when I was 8). www.discogs.com/release/5460...

In which open data and Pobl y Cwm are mentioned in the same blog post, possibly for the first time. (Having seen the data I am not sure about no 5 but maybe opening it up would improve it.) peterkwells.com/2025/02/18/w...

Just as ‘time to recovery’ can be a key metric in infrastructure land, I think ‘time to build and launch a new service’ is (and will be even more) foundational in the world of services with a digital component.

“In the third decade of the twenty first century, power is more digital than physical.”

So we’ve got to the ‘man on a train talking loudly on the phone about it to the annoyance of everyone else’ phase of selling AI to companies. Sigh.

It's been a long year

57 is all time biggest 6n winning margin, right? We might just make it.

Been watching this 6 Nations game for 2 mins now, and we’re now two tries down. Maybe I should go back to something else.

Huge congratulations to Nick Tandy. First man to win all 4 24 hour races (Le Mans, Spa, Nurburgring, and now Daytona) outright: that’s some record.

“A community that is socially divisive and mistrustful has no hope, whatever you throw at it by way of money, jobs, businesses, infrastructure: basically, you are building them on shifting societal sands.”

Not saying that I am ready for a break but I bought a large pot of yoghurt from the shop two days ago. Still haven’t found where I put it.

It’s truly Christmas. Haven’t heard Fairytale of New York yet but have just had my first festive phishing attempt. Really kind, but last time I checked you can’t ‘ship’ an Amazon gift card.

Can we agree that there should be an international standard that stipulates a central register? This will record results of a grammar test. Once passed, all devices you use must stop trying to autocorrect to put commas and apostrophes in places you haven’t put them. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Cancel half the trains from Cardiff to London, the rest massively delayed - not great but can understand flooding problems. To then only run a 5 carriage train on a ten carriage route… and for two of those to be 1st class - pretty difficult to sympathise with.

If I had a tattoo, it would be SQLite's logo. It is an absolute jewel of a product. We only have SQLite because the U.S. Navy hired General Dynamics to make software for a destroyer, for which Richard Hipp invented SQLite. Thanks to those public dollars, it's public domain. That's how it should be.

Welsh joke for you

Buttermere mist

This shows both my age and the fact that I listened to some terrible music when younger but every time I see a SIAM towers model, all I can hear in my head is Bono singing ‘I see seven towers but only one way out’.

It's me! And, more importantly, my Policy colleague Holly. Because Policy should be embedded in every cross-functional team in gov.

I was one of the product managers who forced always on LEDs into almost all electronic products. At home, I either remove them or paint over them because they are so vile. I am so sorry, fellow humans. We got things horribly wrong.

As a CS I get overly worried about sharing personal opinions anywhere but, spurred on by @jenitennison.com's ask (and others responses), here is what @kazhufton.bsky.social and I reckon. Nothing novel, but maybe that's the point. Feeling bold might delete later idk sites.google.com/view/cthimon...

Tickets are now available for Product for the People 6 - the Mild, Mild West! Taking place on the 28th November in Bristol. productforthepeople.xyz/product-for-...