I can only imagine the scenes in England tomorrow morning. Nobody is going to make it to work!

A few years on and some improvements in both the software and the fabrication process, and I'm finally quite happy with how these little terrain frames look. (Old on left, new on right)

Work is all done for the week which means I now begin three weeks of being full time on @emfcamp.bsky.social! There is a rather large amount of stuff we have to order to a field this weekend.

Well well well, it does appear we have successfully primaried the centrist Democrat in Colorado District 1 (Denver) with a more progressive candidate. Lovely.

Lovely day today - chatted with Dad in the morning, then did one of my favorite hikes (a pleasant 8 miles and 2,500 vertical feet), the people at the mountain coffee shop recognised me and gave me the locals' discount, and then we had a rescue just one town over that went very smoothly.

The NZ ETA is maybe the only travel authorisation/visa I've applied for where they have sent a follow up email with suggestions of how to apply for a job and work there instead. (Australia's was the standard EVEN BEING IN AUSTRALIA IS A PRIVILEGE, which, look, it's nice but calm down)

Even if you're not in an RV, I still find RVParky to be the best road-trip-planning tool. This South Island route is ambitious for 8 days, but I think doable.

Finally planned my return to the arguably-better hemisphere, so I'll be at PyCon AU this year, after a week of gallivanting around Aotearoa/NZ. Relatedly, I now hold a through ticket for DEN - IVC, which I imagine is quite a rare city pair to book...

Currently under a simultaneous fire weather warning, severe thunderstorm warning, and tornado watch. A thunderstorm with quite decent-size hail has indeed appeared, let's hope it stops there.

While I take great care when submitting to a CFP with an anonymised review process to use no personal details, to use US English spelling (if it's in the US), etc. - one of the talks I submitted is so obviously from me that I would not be shocked if one reviewer knows just from the title.

My current prediction of where "vibe" (LLM-assisted) coding goes from here: - Management says all PRs must be reviewed by senior engineers - It's a massive time waste, so new metrics are imposed on original authors/LLM users over %age of accepted PRs ...

Blobby is something that Americans deeply don't understand and also intrinsically fear, and so is vital to national security.

Wrote up a blog post version (with a few extra notes) of the first half of my constraining-LLMs video: aeracode.org/2026/06/01/c...

Switched away from VS Code to Zed a couple of weeks ago and I am really enjoying it. Similar UX for me, seems much faster/efficient, a toggle that just turns all "AI" features off if you want (though I personally keep a few on). Only minor nit... no touch support under Wayland for some reason?

I have found a butcher in the Denver area that has both Correct Bacon and Correct Sausages (and they're reasonably priced!) Dangerous stuff.

Had a few things I wanted to talk about regarding LLMs and no conf talk slot soon, so did the talk as a video. Here's 40 minutes on truth, trust, LLMs, and how you should handle and harness them if you're going to use them: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJA6...

Congrats to the last.fm crew on going independent - I still scrobble my music over there, and somehow now have over 20 years of history. Hoping they've got enough revenue flow to build new things.

Working on a new talk/video and I have harnessed the power of impossibly large neural networks to reliably always output one thing: cheese or onion?

Considering favouring my Lyft driver tonight purely based on his excellent taste in trance/dance music.

Took a little time away from LA and PyCon to go visit Joshua Tree (in my quest to see every national park) and it was a lovely time.

After a lovely ride on the Metro from LAX (I now deem LA a Proper City as it has a train from the airport... sorry Melbourne), I am now in Long Beach for #pycon! Though likely just relaxing in my room for tonight prepping for the social onslaught of the next few days...

Last autumn, I finally started on my quest to find the Most American City - and the first city that dropped out of my algorithm was Kalamazoo, Michigan. So I went to see why. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqKF...

Always great when the team gets to train with Clear Creek Fire, and doubly so when they bring the ladder truck along!

I have finally found a task that the MacBook Neo struggles at - editing 4K video with fancy transitions (it's fine with simple cuts!)

Rode my motorbike to the spaceport today, which sounds a lot cooler than it actually is given the number of things that have actually gone to space from the spaceport is zero. Seems like it could be a good place to fly some small planes out of though!

Kind of wondering if I should start streaming occasionally. Some of the ability to talk about stuff without the structure of talks or YouTube videos, though the default content choice still feels like games (streaming projects from the workshop isn’t very doable)

While I ran video at @northbaypython.org this year entirely from the equipment I already have, the eternal problem with video work is thinking "well if I just got the $1000 vision mixer and that $900 lens things would be nicer"...

Heading home after a delightful weekend of @northbaypython.org - always lovely to see everyone (we always get a great crowd) as well as the cats, of course.

Finally put a CFP submission into an event after taking a break of a few years; hopefully will be adding in a few more this year. Mostly want to move to doing beginner-to-intermediate talks to give more junior engineers some guidance in this rather turbulent industry, I think.

Gotta love physical therapists. Within ten minutes of my first visit, she'd worked out that my left leg is currently a centimeter longer than my right (hopefully due to musculature and tendons rather than the bones)

Trying out iPhone for a couple of weeks (Android annoyed me a lot recently) and it's fascinating. Hardware is obviously great, apps are generally smoother and nicer, but wow do I miss there being a universal idea of "back".

Of course, from here the astronauts will go to the medical bay so the flight surgeon can give them the all-clear, and then from there they'll be placed in the Possession/Inhabitation Chamber where NASA's Chief Occult Officer will ensure they are not controlled by any evil Moon spirits.

Great job to everyone at NASA who made that mission go off apparently flawlessly. Now let's hope the next mission isn't too far away...

My other half pays basically no attention to world news and I am honestly envious of him right now.

Took my new-ish UV printer for a spin and made a little memento of the Artemis II picture from yesterday. Fits on the coaster really nicely!

When I find out that one of the only true 70mm IMAX versions in the world is being shown in the BFI IMAX, of course I'm going to see the movie again (much like I did with Interstellar at the SF Metreon)

After a request from both my partner and also (weirdly) my barber back in Denver, I took a trip to a random town in the Midlands.

Look, I like planes, but nothing beats sitting in the Eurostar as it glides past the Dutch countryside at high speed.

I am increasingly becoming fond of poster sessions as one of the best parts of conferences. The one at KubeCon is unfortunately too small, but still had some great chats with some of the presenters.

I know there's a big conference in town but I ran into someone I knew in central Amsterdam, kilometres away from the venue, within 20 minutes of arriving!

Woke up somewhere over the Atlantic to the news of AC8646. Just awful stuff. Crew seem to have saved the passengers at the cost of their own lives. Initially looks like ATC controller overload, which should be a big wake-up call given the underfunded state of US ATC for years, but we'll see.

I did not realise it was the end of spring break and I am already feeling for the gate agent as an entire queue of families are being rearranged so their kids are seated next to them.

Just finished watching Project Hail Mary and that is a fantastic film. It is going to trouble Contact for my "favourite movie of all time" slot, for sure.

Getting an MRI always feels like stepping into the future. "Don't worry, just lie inside this giant superconducting magnet and we'll bombard your protons with radio pulses to see what their spin state is like"

Got a MacBook Neo last week (as having a Mac is occasionally useful, and my old Mac Mini is basically dead) - and it's a perfectly good laptop. Great build quality, good battery, and barely notice the "low' specs. Only gripe is they need to design for "no touch ID" - like the Windows PIN option.

I have often said they should make another Pokémon game that doesn't involve fighting and, well, Pokopia is fantastic.

Doing my US tax return involves telling them how much money is in my UK pension, so yesterday I found myself driving 10 minutes to an area where Three UK has a tower with a roaming agreement just so I could receive an MFA code to log in and see the amount, to tell the IRS, so they can ignore it.

Lovely work Gorton and Denton, and congratulations to Hannah Spencer. Resounding win for hopefulness and sensible politics. #ukpol

Learning GDScript as I play around with Godot. I always love understanding a language that is designed very particularly, especially one with Python influences.

Unfortunately, while I got to the hotel quickly, it turns out that the hotel aggregator that my company's travel agency made a hotel booking through took the money but didn't actually make the reservation due to a "system error", and now they are arguing about who pays for it while I wait.