"The cost of intelligence is hyper-deflating faster than Moore's Law; we are moving to a world of intelligence surplus" -Marc Andreessen, Jan 2026
There is a silent heist happening in the billable hours of every major software agency. We’ve entered a Golden Hour - a brief, high-stakes arbitrage window where the cost of production has cratered, but the price tag remains frozen in 2022. History is littered with these windows. They are defined by Knowledge Asymmetry : the gap between what a client thinks it takes to build a product and the time…
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." - Linus Torvalds, 2000 "Code is cheap. Show me the users." - Me, 2026 The Death of the Dev Moat In 2023, if you had a bullshit idea (like a social media app for cats), you still had to find $50,000 or 6 months of your own life to build a prototype. That cost acted as a bullshit filter . In 2026, that filter is gone. Code has become cheap, and the bullshit has…
Oshkosh and their AI driven garbage trucks At CES 2026 , Oshkosh Corporation took the stage not just as a vehicle manufacturer, but as a data powerhouse. Their flagship innovation for the "Neighborhood of the Future" is an AI-Powered Contamination Detection system integrated into their refuse and recycling fleets. The stated goal is noble of course - " Landfill Diversion" - by using advanced…
AI Agents hooked up directly to the customer over SMS text messaging are a disaster waiting to happen. A chatbot bug had real world consequences for a United Airlines customer last week - their booking got cancelled by mistake. The United Airlines AI Agent gets it wrong over text message The chatbot presented two options: A) Yes, cancel & get a refund B) No, not ready to cancel Pretty simple you'd…
The iPhone Triple Zero Meltdown is a textbook example of a safety regression, where a software patch meant to fix a critical vulnerability ends up creating a larger disaster. The incident sent shockwaves through the Australian telecommunications industry and resulted in tens of thousands of people not being able to call Triple Zero / 000 (the Aussie equivalent of US 911 or UK 999). 1. The Goal:…
The problem You're booking your next holiday and while checking prices you key in the search for one passenger. When it comes time to make the actual booking, you select the required four passengers for your family, but suddenly the price per ticket rises from $250 to $400! Why it happens Airline booking systems (aka Global Distribution Systems / GDS) cannot split a single booking across "buckets"…
We’ve all been there... it’s 2pm on a Friday and you’ve just found a bug that defies logic. You don't have time for a robust architectural solution. You have time for a few lines of code that will do the job. You then tell yourself the biggest lie in software development: I’ll refactor this later. In reality, that temporary hack often ends up becoming the foundation of the entire system. If you…
Scenario A team finds themselves constantly being delayed due to lengthy internal requisition processes and bureaucracy. Problem Projects are delayed due to internal bureaucracy. Important pieces of hardware and software are waiting on another part of the organisation to requisition them and set them up. How it works Instead of requesting the resources at the point they are needed, the team…
Scenario A valuable customer is hit by a major intractable bug or a serious system limitation with your software. Problem Your company needs 6-8 weeks to resolve it, but the customer is demanding immediate action or else they'll walk away. The plan Get your company an initial 2-4 weeks of time with rounds of meetings and follow up meetings. At the same time, hire a business analyst (or project…
This article summarizes the important factors involved when deciding between the two leading cross platform mobile development frameworks of Google's Flutter and Facebook's React Native . Flutter Advantages ✅ It can design complex UIs which are standardized across Android & iOS resulting in less platform dependent bugs. ✅ Easier to learn for existing mobile developers. ✅ Dart is a fully object…
The below is taken from an interview conducted at the Computer History Museum in 2004 by Grady Booch . He interviewed early Apple developers Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld about the development of the original Apple Mac , and in particular MacPaint software. On the art of developing software Grady Booch: So what makes software beautiful for you? Do you care about the beauty of software? Bill…
Starting out When you're starting out your career as a software developer, you'll typically get a first role as either a backend or frontend dev, and after a couple of years, gain some experience on the other side to become a full stack developer. Company specific lock in Since every organisation has its own tech stack, a full stack developer in Company A will have a different set of skills than…
Within the .NET ecosystem, two ORMs dominate, the lightweight Dapper (open source) and the fully featured Entity Framework (EF) by Microsoft. Depending on your project's size and requirements, either of these should work well for you, but there are definitely some known cases where each is a better fit. That's what we're discussing in this post. When to use Dapper? Small to medium size projects.…
A classic black swan event has just happened to the LUNA cryptocurrency. A black swan event is characterised by a spectacular run up in price, followed by the price falling off a cliff to near zero. It famously happened to a hedge fund named LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) back in 1998. The resulting loss temporarily destabilised Wall Street, requiring a bail out to be organised by the US…
Nootropics are a popular new type of dietary supplement that claim to enhance brain function in a number of ways including better memory, sharper thinking, alertness, improved verbal ability, more clarity and the elimination of 'brain fog'. I started looking into some options available that deliver to Australia and came across this brand called Mind Lab Pro . Their tablets contain some of the same…
The InMotion S1 electric scooter. At the front is my wife's scooter, the VSETT 8. Electric kickscooters are really popular right now. Their sweet spot in terms of usefulness is probably for people living in urban and inner city areas, or in areas which have good bicycle paths. I live in an inner city suburb of Perth, Western Australia, and work near the Swan river - my reason for buying one was to…
Yes, Xamarin owes its existence to two other bits of technology that were huge around 2008 - the Unity Game Engine and the iPhone. The reason is that a confluence of events around 2008 provided the push to get the Mono project into mobile app development. This resulted in MonoTouch (for iOS) and Mono for Android, which eventually became Xamarin as we know it today. The Mono project was founded in…
A circuit breaker can help you improve the stability of your application by protecting calls to third party services; e.g. a web service, a network resource, a database, or any other component which can intermittently fail. Its a fundamental pattern for protecting your system from all manner of integration point problems. It is a way to fail fast while there is a known problem with an integration…
and deploying it with MetaMask and MyEtherWallet (MEW) Introduction Ethereum has a vast amount of developer resources available, such that for a beginner its hard to know where to start. If you go with the recommended approach you'd probably choose Solidity along with either JavaScript or golang. JavaScript and golang are traditionally the most well supported languages for the developer tooling…
The NBitcoin library is the most active and well supported library in .NET for working with Bitcoin and other similar cryptocurrencies. NBitcoin fully supports Bitcoin Cash (BCH), however the ebook and programming guide examples focus solely on Bitcoin Core (BTC). The problem you encounter when following the NBitcoin guide is firstly that the QBitNinja API only supports Bitcoin Core and secondly…
A counter overflow bug happens when an unsigned integer variable storing a counter reaches its maximum value; when its already at the maximum, as soon as one more value gets added to it, the variable will reset back to 0 and continue counting up from there. If the rest of the software is not expecting this counter reset, it can result in system failures. So the longer the system is running for,…
I setup this online shop over a couple of weekends - Chow Slow - Slow Feeder Dog Bowls . After launch I continued to make various improvements and optimisations to the presentation and content of the site. Since launch three months ago, the online shop has so far taken 72 orders. The eCommerce SaaS product Shopify was used to build the site, on the Basic Shopify (monthly) plan. Here below are my…
This article applies mainly to mobile apps which are not in active development. It applies equally to mobile apps on the public app stores and also to enterprise mobile apps which get distributed via other means (such as MDM software). Example scenario of an inactive/failing app: The active marketing of your app that happened at launch has now stopped Your app's last update was several months ago…
Many hobbyist IoT projects running on the Raspberry Pi (RPi) require a webserver running on the RPi which receives requests from a browser, where the client using the browser is connected either to the local WiFi network, or possibly (via a port forwarding setup), connected to the public Internet. An alternative that is easy to setup, lightweight and low cost is one that makes use of Amazon's SQS…
The below steps go through setting up a custom domain name on your Azure Web App, using the FreeDNS service from NameCheap . Both the www subdomain www.yourdomainhere.com and the naked yourdomainhere.com will be setup. I have an Azure S1 Small Instance App Service Plan on which I'm running 4 web apps . Originally I had planned to use Azure DNS , to keep everything within the same cloud service,…