I appreciate so many great comedic actors have transitioned to drama very well but I *cannot* take Legends on Nextflix seriously when Steve Coogan is in any scene. I keep expecting him to start saying “Putting a damp spoon back in the bowl is the tea-drinking equivalent of sharing a needle..."

When someone tells me I can’t raise a bug without story points.

I see we are at that stage in uk current affairs where I can’t tell if “PM” in my feed is “Product Manager” or “Prime Minister” again.

I felt this post in my core. So spot on.

Always nice to start the week with a reminder email from an automated system which describes me as a ‘resource’ on a ‘work package’.

My 8-year-old has discovered Gala - Freed from desire. Absolute classic, but ruined forever by her interpretation of the lyrics. "My lover's got no money, he's got a trampoline", and I can't unhear it.

this really does make me despair. this is a woman who has just got elected as a Reform councillor. she works for the NHS and wants to know “where the money is going”. it’s going on social care, babe

Happy Friday. I can’t close a ticket because the person keeps replying to the closure message with a “thumbs up” in Outlook which sends an email and RE-OPENS the ticket. 😂

happy 9th anniversary to the day we watched Zendaya fall madly in love with Tom Holland in real-time

I'm hiring in London! CodeYourFuture helps high potential people in poverty to get good jobs in tech. If you want work that makes a huge impact to individuals, working with a wonderful team of staff and volunteers, get in touch :) codeyourfuture.io/community-mi...

It’s the easiest thing. All you have to do is try to get •all• of the three.

I see a few people are seeing this and thinking the problem is with the man (senior engineer). No. The problem is the system that enabled him. And the system that kept everyone else quiet. And even though this was 30 years ago and it may not be so explicit now, the system has not changed much.

I will be laughing about this all day

Ugh. I'm so bad at this pitching for business thing. I told my other half about something I got annoyed at on Linkedin today, and he's: "the smart thing is to say that this is possible despite their claims, you just need to know the right person and you have a day rate" and well.. I did not do that.

keepthingsopen.com Early GDS did so much work to enshrine open source as not just a positive tech working practice but a democratic choice in the spirit of open government. A bunch of dinosaur infosec people (who mean well) want to close all the boxes, at the cost of better services. Say no!

Our obsession with software developers for so long has resulted in a collective pretending that they're the first/only ones to have a wide range of human experiences This is why it's so difficult to connect up evidence from existing domains to this space

we’ve all been to this talk

Some people say we don’t build beautiful things anymore and, like, lol. Motherfuckers, we built this:

Still the funniest scene in Star Wars.

TECH BRUNCHLORDS: we believe AI has successfully achieved human-level cognition NEUROLOGISTS: okay so your brain is like, imagine if there was a kind of pudding that sang two bars from Semi-Charmed Life whenever somebody nearby was baking cookies, right? we don’t know why it does that

It occurs to me that, as a 48 year old, our political class has spent most of my adult life and almost half of my entire life being very, very angry indeed at members of the public for being upset about war crimes. And that’s if I count it from 2003, and not Northern Ireland or anything earlier.

Job hunting as a developer is a nightmare, right? Tell me your stories of navigating the recruitment process as a dev looking for a job, and if you've been in the game for a while, tell me how it's changed lately (I want to use these stories on the Modern Software Engineering channel)

Weird theory: shared success is more profitable than destruction

I have no idea what's happening on Eastenders and this might be the funniest scene I've ever randomly tuned into

Post your warning sign

There are two things that really bother me in tech commentary these days. First thing is the constant calling everyone else stupid, second is the saying because everyone else is stupid no positive change is possible

As I say in the post, if you're in the UK *please* write to your MP about this. Don't just pontificate online. Write a short email to your MP and tell them you disagree with NHS England's decision to shut down all their Open Source code.

I'm quoted in this article. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2524962-nhs-england-rushes-to-hide-software-over-ai-hacking-fears/ #nhs #opensource #github

On a serious note, I’m of the opinion that brutalism really was at its best at the edges (plants, brick, etc). I loved Sunderland’s old civic centre, and sadly never took pics inside. A kind person did sneak me a few when I found out it was being demolished, but it was fenced off so outside pic only

New blog post: NHS Goes To War Against Open Source https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/ The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed …

Ok, I don’t know *how* I did it, but my Instagram has little to no stupid supplement influencers anymore and instead gave me a bloke today shooting the shit about what makes a track “matrix music” or not, ultimately stating you could make a matrix of whether music is matrix music or not. 😁

Thank you @garethlpowell.bsky.social for a short story title that seems to have been written precisely for me.

Obligatory I am on holiday here is my pic for today post

I am sad that this continues to happen but also it’s so so so so satisfying watching it play out each time. I am not famous like Ian Coldwater, but had a CTO take credit for my work using “some previous progress” to hand wave. Yeeep it’s now my handle in a women in tech community. 😁

Alright people. I'm creating a new talk for @devoxx.uk next week, and as usual I want your insights into The Real World. If you're using AI as a developer or engineering leader, let me know which fundamentals or "stuff that we've known for ages" are helpful.

me does not know this other cat #cat #catsofbluesky #acataday

This is incredibly charming. I highly recommend using it on desktop, where you have a real cursor.

Introducing Cursor Camp, a website to hang out with other cursors. Out now :) > neal.fun/cursor-camp/

Fascinated by this new series in the papers of “people who have made a huge windfall contrive to go bankrupt”

I think it's really underappreciated that a large chunk of people across the world are everyday being served images of the world's worst atrocities, essentially live as they happen, in ways previously only experienced by people on the frontline, who have historically had years of trauma as a result.

This is a simplification to fit a character limit (assuming one doctor or engineer is the same as others is a common problem too in startups trying to break into public sector or enterprise size clients) but hoping the point is clear anyway 😁

So I am bringing this from LinkedIn. (Sorry). But it’s an ex-clinician CEO raging that med startups aren’t winning NHS tender work. That it’s going to non UK companies (fair). But… David can actually beat Goliath here if you are smart about it.

This one that's gone viral.. Whenever you automate or abstract anything, you're making a guess about what the operator needs to know about, and there's always a risk of obfusctating information that turned out to be important.. (1/2) www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

Was enjoying this little piece of lock graffiti today

Stretch goal today is to get to spaghetti junction to then eat spaghetti under spaghetti junction 😅

Career goal - work in enough industries that the software bubble use for analogies all the damn time so I can debunk all of the bad analogies on LinkedIn before they even get there. If I see another ⛴️🚢📦 or 🚆🚝🚂 or 🩺😷❤️‍🩹 or 🧬🧪👩🏾‍🔬 analogy on LinkedIn… 😅

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

I was like well think of a codebase as a shared narrative with an oral tradition with lots of tacit rules and he was like, yeah yeah I get it, it's the same here