The new leverage of software engineering Engineering teams have been investing heavily in AI and there are clear benefits emerging. Engineers move faster. Boilerplate takes less time. Tests are easier to write. Documentation is less painful to maintain. But if the headline impact is that the same team gets through the same backlog a little faster, that isn't the transformation we were promised,…
Back in the era of the generalist For most of my career, the advice has been to specialise. Choose a discipline. Become excellent at it. Build a career around the depth of expertise that other people do not have. That advice made sense. Most organisations were built around specialists because most worthwhile work required specialist tools and knowledge. A software developer wrote the code. A…
More and more I'm appreciating just how important communication is in all aspects of life, and how incredibly difficult it is to be genuinely good at it. Professionally speaking, I now see my ability to communicate as the most important aspect holding back career growth. The ability to execute, have good ideas and deliver improvement are all worth so much less if they're not effectively and…
I’ve just ordered the Rabbit R1. I was tempted when it was first announced, but the first version seemed to miss the mark and was widely considered almost useless. But the team behind it kept going. They’ve refined it, improved it, and the new version of the OS looks much more capable. I’ve also had a craving to play with hardware for a while now. The Playdate is on the wish list, as is basically…
Back to Whoop After twelve months away from it I'm returned to Whoop. I got a lot of value out of it when I first used it, but when my son was born I knew training would have to take a back seat for a little while. We're now in more of a position where regular training is happening, goals are being reset and my craving for more data is increasing. Of course 24 hours after re-subscribing, Google…
Switching to Fastmail I've used Google Workspace for about 15 years now, and it's been great. The Google ecosystem is comfortable and works well. But more recently — and AI may well be the trigger here — I've wanted to have more ownership of my own data. To know where it is and what it is being used for. To this end, I've started to build a personal database. I'll share more on that another time,…
Having Kids And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the ability to take off for some other country at a moment's notice. That was so great. Why did I never do that? See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never…
Craig Mod: MacBook Neo and How the iPad Should Be I agree with a lot of this. The iPad has for too long occupied this strange middle ground. The hardware has been extremely capable for years whilst the software has inexplicably lagged behind. This is now more noticeable with AI. I've been tempted through the years to consider the iPad Pro as my primary machine. After all, a vast majority of my…
Manipulation versus management, tools versus agents I recently read an essay by Alan Kay from 1989 that originally featured in The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, edited by Brenda Laurel. This was essentially before the internet, before smartphones, and long before any of the AI assistants we now use daily. And yet it describes the exact problem we’re still trying to solve. Kay makes a…
Wales stands at a critical moment as our economy continues to degrade the natural resources that underpin our health, security, and prosperity. Wales is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, with almost 1 out of 5 species at risk of extinction. Wales’ consumption levels far exceed sustainable limits. If replicated globally, our resource use would require more than two Earths,…
Favourite books read in 2025 I haven’t read as many books as I was hoping to this year, but thanks to Matter I’ve read a lot more from across the web. Their support for sending articles to the Kindle makes for an excellent experience for long-form articles. I’ll try to write about my favourite articles in the next few days, but here are my top three books I read this year. Between Two Kingdoms, by…
The overwhelmingly cheap cost of storage has meant that we rarely delete things any more. At work we come up with an idea, research it and present our findings as something that we could do. A few months pass, an evolution on that original idea comes along. We refresh our memory from the original idea, research what’s changed and then present it as a new idea, leaving the old one as it was.…
Today shows that you can still play this as a team sport, with honesty, fairness and transparency at the centre of every race and still come out on top as champions. Papaya rules.
I realise I’m a couple of weeks late to the party with this, but the onboarding user experience with poke.com is brilliant. It immediately feels familiar, being positioned as a contact through an existing chat interface, and it feels as though it “knows” you within a few minutes. Negotiating a monthly price is also novel, though I expect the vast majority of users end up paying the same amount.…