Thrilled to be back at NDC London 2026 in January with a new talk - Meditations on Code as Art. Tracing the through-line from digital graffiti and the Apollo 11 launch computer to the creative urge to see yourself reflected in your work. On sale now. ndclondon.com/agenda/medit...

important to remember that apocalypse is a fantasy that absolves you of your responsibilities

This is what you get for kissing the ring. Hard to feel much sympathy for big tech in 2025, but this is people's lives.

Love when Trent goes full The Fragile. youtu.be/8rebzJGhnog?...

I just… what the fuck is even happening

So I'm gonna be doing a new and ultra weird talk next year - and I'm doing a bit of a test run at DotNetNorth next month. www.meetup.com/dotnetnorth/... It's gonna be weird, come out.

Great change.

"I’m not saying TCS are bad" Though for the avoidance of doubt, TCS are fucking terrible.

Think about it: code reviews are exploratory testing. We might think it strange to still be 100% reliant on manual exploratory testing months into the lifespan of a product or system.

You cannot understand politics in the United States in 2025 without understanding Gamergate. It is the Rosetta Stone for our current nightmare.

I’m almost done with Twitter but

every time there's political violence discourse i think about how jo cox was assassinated in broad daylight by a fascist who shouted "britain first" as he shot her, and now nine years later her party is dedicating every moment in power to placating the ideology of her murderer

Though to address the obvious "blah blah blah political violence is never the answer" - it astonishes me that people don't understand what words mean. All violence is fundamentally political. Since time began. Since before we had words for it.

America having a "the slug voted for salt" moment with this one in the most problematically American way hey. If you create a culture that kills you, you are the cause.

And we wonder how we got here. Heartbreaking.

There is no better timezone than "Romance Daylight Time".

It's never "too many graves" It's always "not enough shovels"

Watched The Crow remake last night and if anything that film didn't get *enough* hate. What a ponderous, missing the point load of garbage. It looked nice I guess. How they could do a Crow remake with practically no soundtrack is beyond me.

Spotify is so unregulated someone is squatting on known but defunct bands for visibility.

A shame, because it's a good joke about all the yelling men.

Oh I have shaved 500 yaks and I would shave 500 more more...

Somehow LinkedIn manages to be all the exhaustion of reading work emails, with all the dread of social media. Truly the most cursed platform.

Much like "crab", industrial music is constantly re-evolving from first principles basically anywhere where there's a bunch of metal and plastic laying about

20 years between these two photos - whilst I do my best to exist outside of space and time, I guess I can see my age finally 😂

41 years old (yesterday) and going to get my first eye test today. Pray 4 me.

This is a fascinating look at the second order effects of the popularisation of model assisted content generation. A perfect storm - actual real imagery vs a frothing media that wants to string up anything that uses models, mulched out in the middle by low quality implementation.

Commemerating new conference talks by being "back on my bullshit" with some fun new shirts

Interesting observation re:model assisted code - vibe coded software exhibits the average anti-patterns of the languages culture and ecosystem. .NET vibe code trends towards enterprise over/no-design (services, managers et al) JavaScript vibe code is often spaghetti/full of mixed concerns

In fact, most of the ire you see against "object orientated code" is just ire against procedural code disguised as OO-code. And of course, yes, that stuff is bad.

The glass is empty I drink from it nonetheless Is this loyalty? Or is it fear?

Every service class in a piece of software I see is just a place where mid-devs hide proceedural implementation due to chronic under-design. Can't name the thing? Service! Don't know what your abstraction is? Service! Anemic, undiscoverable, procedural code every time. ManagerClass for 2010-2025.

In retrospect inventing comments was a mistake really. The original sin. Bring back gatekeeping - if you want to shit on something on the internet learn to make a whole ass website to do it.

Reboot the whole damn technology industry.

Absolutely Kafkaesque to make the environmental artist redundant of a game where it's two component parts are "the environment" and "the controls" less than a week after launch. Reboot the games industry.

However much I kinda hate to say it, Thornhill still put out the best Deftones album this year. youtu.be/Kfj5YXnUXsI?...

Happy Windows 95 day. Non-ironically one of the most exciting early technology moments of my childhood. I remember trying out an interactive demo for Win3.1 that came on the front of Computer Shopper and being so excited for 95 to come out. Probably sad to say it's a "core memory", but it is.

Listened to the new Deftones record about 8 times through today and I'm afraid it's really really mid. Like a 6/10 at best. Love the band, but it's formless and meandering. The singles didn't do it for me, next to no harsh vocals, no choruses, no big moments.

Lol got banned from my first ever subreddit tonight. I actually thought I was being too polite.

This video was recorded in the year of my birth - the consternation around technology could have been today. Conflicts around overreach, control, and the erosion of humanity. Maybe the techno-optimism I matured in was an abberation of the millennium. Fascinating watch. youtu.be/VwNWUNykqAs?...

In 2011 I came to a conference held in this hall in the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas that convinced me I could probably give the whole tech speaking thing a go. Perhaps it's idle sentimentality to take a photo of an empty convention centre hallway, but it feels important to me.

Las Vegas, you've been real. A whirlwind of maximal Vegas experiences. I feel differently about this city each time I come here - and each trip is very different than the last. Hardly went near the strip this time other than a stroll today that made me feel extremely nostalgic for past adventures.

A lot of folks I know have struggled with the anxiety of choice when trying to find a path forwards, and talking to some lovely folks at KCDC reminded me of a phrase I'd heard: "Stick the stickers". Don't be stuck as the child collecting pristine stickers and never using them. Life doesn't wait.

Incredible time at @kcdc.bsky.social this week - hope everyone had fun at my talks, had such a great time chatting to you all. Also, excellent conference adjacent chaos all round 🖤 Next...

Last session of the day with @davidwhitney.co.uk ! #kcdc2025 #MVPBuzz

Which is ironic because science is absolutely meaningless without humanity and culture to consume it's works. I'll take a world without better rocket ships over a world without music every single time.

Stan culture is pure distilled brainrot. (No problem at all with Swift, seems like a good person, but cannot fathom how "don't align your personality to a brand" got so utterly reversed in popular culture)

By complete chance I've read all of Something Is Killing The Children and House of Slaughter over the last month or so, really enjoyed it, this is a good deal (I paid a lot more on Kindle!) - www.humblebundle.com/books/fright...