Recent content on Nat Torkington
(I wrote this on BlueSky. Posting here because I want to see how on point my analysis was, looking back from years hence) 
 I saw the headline “American companies’ use of Chinese AI models is high and growing.” (can’t find it now but this is an example of the genre) Duh. Hypesters sold AI as “save money by replacing humans with AI!” so if success is…
The most fun thing about using Claude has been realising I have a standard way of working, one that I need to tell the agent because all too often the LLM’s default way of working is messy and accident-prone. Here’s what the first part of my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md looks like: 
 ## Standard way of working
 
 - **Task tracking**: Use kata to track backlog items and tasks as they…
I am weary of the slopwords that LLM prose now becomes. It’s like they were trained on bad LinkedIn posts and TEDx talks, and now that’s all you ever get from them. So I asked Claude to generate the Ten Commandments as slop — and it delivered. 
 
 Alright. Buckle up. Here’s the Decalogue, run through the content mill: 
 I. No other gods before me. 
Here’s…
I’ve been publishing my Claude Code skills to a marketplace I set up . I call them powerups, inspired by Jesse Vincent’s Superpowers . 
 Some are good. Some are held together with duct tape and optimism, and I can tell which is which by now. Some are in use by others, most are just for my own use. I’m making the repos public so you can see what I work on, should you care.
The inspiration for this site’s redesign. Simon builds his blog with a custom Django app and publishes a mix of entries, links, and notes.
See the Intro for context. (We’re hiring WinForms seniors! Mail me: nat@ontempo.co.nz ) 
 [20221224] How to Structure Your .NET Solutions: Architecture and Trade-Offs – what it says on the box. 
 [20221224] DocFx – generate static documentation site from embedded XML documentation. 
 [20221224] .NET Advent Calendar – most are interesting, though they’re so diverse it’s the rare…
See the Intro for context. 
 [20221231] Temporal.io – With Temporal, you write your various complex, potentially long-running actions as normal, synchronous code, which Temporal “magically” turns into distributed, asynchronous, automatically retried, idempotent jobs. The design is really elegant, and removes all of the hard work from writing code that must keep things in sync…
See the Intro for context. 
 [20221231] React Admin – claims of a full-featured data grid, which is 50-80% of many of our apps. (As well as roles & permissions and validations) 
 [20221224] Death to the Line of Death – the idea that an application should separate trustworthy UI from untrusted content. The typical example is in a web browser, where untrustworthy web content…
See the Intro for context. (Also, this was a late addition and I’m focused in my interest, so this is thin) 
 [20221231] Reverse Engineering Notion’s Prompts – in Hacker News discussion there’s skepticism you’re getting the actual prompts, vs GPT-3 being its usual stylistically faithful yet factually inaccurate creative self. Someone from Notion confirmed this. 
…
I used to read a lot of the technical web and social media for O’Reilly Media, where I wrote the daily “Four Short Links” digest. I still read a lot of online content, but now for my own purposes. I’ve been CEO and now CTO of a company that makes retail management software (ERP, POS, and other acronyms for fashion retailers), so I’m short of time and my reading is…
See the Intro for context. 
 [20221231] Four Day Work Week Going Well – 97% of the 495 respondents want to stay with a four-day workweek and so do the 27 companies that responded. 
 [20221223] 20 Great Open Questions – for coaching and more. 
 [20221221] Engineering in a Hybrid World – At the time of this report, 
 over 50% of respondents had no definitive plan to…
See the Intro for context. 
 [20220203] Tree/Loop Prompts 
 
 Our ability to ________ is a function of our ability to ________ 
 ________ has a number of contributing factors, including ________ 
 When ________ [increases/decreases] we would expect to see __________ [increase/decrease] 
 To [increase/decrease] ___________, we have a number of options including ____________…
See the Intro for context. 
 [20221223] PEACH Framework for Cloud Security – risks associated with customer-facing interfaces and determines: the complexity of the interface as a predictor of vulnerability; 
 whether the interface is shared or duplicated per tenant; what type of security boundaries are in place (e.g. hardware virtualization); how strongly these boundaries have been…
See the Intro for context. 
 [20221231] Job Drain Pattern – we make heavy use of this internally. Cf In-Memory Outbox : an easy-to-use, reliable solution to perform atomic operations that update a database and send/publish messages, and it works for any database updates that are sent as commands (delivered by durable message queues). 
 [20221231] Make Your Database Tables Smaller…
See the Intro for context. 
 [20221231] EndBasic – BASIC with cloud, DOS-like GUI. Actively developed. 
 [20221231] pbproxy – send your clipboard anywhere you can ssh. 
 [20221231] LCARS – open source web implementation of the Star Trek UI. 
 [20221231] VAP – video animation player. Particle effects and transparency on a webpage. 
 [20221223] mdBook…
See the Intro for context. 
 [20221231] 36 Things I Learned in 2022 – #1 blew my mind: For the first time in history in 2020, the weight of things produced by humans (concrete, metals, plastic) was greater than the weight of the global living biomass. 
 [20221224] Reported Sleep Duration Reveals Segmentation of the Adult Life-course into Three Phases – early adulthood…
Last updated: 2022-04-10 
 Bandcamp is a great place to buy music, because most of the money you pays goes straight to the artist. If you buy on a special Bandcamp Friday, then Bandcamp don’t even take their usual commission on the sale – all the money goes straight to the artist. 
 I like acoustic stringband music, with or without vocals. I go beyond those boundaries for great…
I’ve seen a few people propose a big government project around 5G mobile technology. I couldn’t find more detail to any proposals, so I did my own research to inform my own opinions on what’s needed and what’s not. I wrote up where I landed so I won’t forget it, and I’m sharing in case it’s useful to you. If you have corrections, etc. please contact me on…
Here’s a braindump of some things I’ve learned over the years. Caveat lector: my experiences inform this, and they aren’t representative of all the possibilities, etc. Ignore this if you want; I’ve been meaning to write some notes for Kiwis or Aussies who are joining startups for the first time, and someone just became my excuse. 
 Maturity 
 Startups are very…
Looks like NZ will get a CTO real soon now . It’s hard to avoid the word “debacle” in describing how it came about: a false start at making an appointment, a whiff of impropriety in the appointments process that resulted in a Ministerial demotion …. 
 This is a shame because there are very real reasons that NZ should be increasing its IT heft in Government. There’s the…
There’s an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ’s R&D incentives. In particular, they’ll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace them with R&D tax credits. As the FAQ says , There are differences in the definition of eligible expenditure between the Growth Grant and the proposed R&D Tax Incentive (for instance, overseas…
I asked my Twitter friends for recommendations of books to read over Christmas. I said that I’ve already consumed the new Expanse novel and the new Philip Pullman (intended to indicate that I like that style of sf) and I said I like non-fiction if it’s interesting and well-written (e.g., Bakewell’s book on Montaigne , or Holmes’s “Age of Wonder” ). 
…
Hello, American friends! President-Elect Trump has given his speech and begun to redact his campaign website of the obviously illegal and impossible campaign promises, and you look up from your keyboard through an election-defeat hangover and want to move to New Zealand. 
 First of all, consider staying . America’s problems won’t be solved if all the tolerant and progressive people leave.…
I was just catching up on Tim Kong’s excellent blog , when I read this great quote from Dan Carter: 
 
 
 “One thing we talk about over and over with this current All Blacks side is about never focusing on the outcome. We view the outcome as a function of following our processes. That might sound a little dry to some, but looking back at every major loss we’ve had…
(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration . On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it . Instead of a tweetstorm, here’s my response in a vintage retro format known as “a blog post”) 
 You can always look back at every failure and assign one or more causes, because SOMETHING…
Job titles don’t matter, because it’s the work that counts. But job titles matter because they get you meetings with partners, interviews for next jobs, etc. They send signals that can be useful so, conversely, life can be harder if you’re sending the wrong signal. 
 There’s an implicit hierarchy in American job titles. Kiwis have a different implicit hierarchy…
It’s bloody hard to build something new into the world. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy: there’s a lot of unfunded and unrecognised work that you have to do before you can get to the point where fame and/or fortune arrive. And once you’ve finished the painful birth of your new service or product into the world, maybe even defining an entirely new product category…
tl;dr: Today’s NZ Herald drove me to this analysis/rant. I’m giving the damn thing up and will get my news from other sites, Radio New Zealand and NewsHub . You should too. 
 I can’t imagine how disheartening it is to work as a journalist in New Zealand. Almost as disheartening as it is to be a news consumer in New Zealand. 
 The newspapers are shit. I include Stuff ,…
[I posted this on a Slack recently, and would like to give it a longer life than Slack’s 10,000 line scrollback. –Nat] 
 Socially constructed roles like “douche-bro” and “rock star teacher” are generally strongly viewpoint dependent. The rhetoric of continuous improvement is part of self-help, get rich quick, professional development, factory management, military training, science,…
This post is prompted by The engagement era - and the artist’s place within it , written by Courtney Johnston (director of the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt). She has been pondering the shifting fashions for ‘collection’ vs ’education’ vs ’engagement’ in museums and galleries, trying to make sense of the swirl of ambitions and activities around those…
I write a short daily series for O’Reilly Media, Four Short Links , which I’ve done for years. I recently posted a link to someone’s “10 Golden Rules for Becoming a Better Programmer” and said “what are your 10 rules for being better in your field? If you haven’t built a list, then you aren’t thinking hard enough about what you do.” 
 Dan Meyer…
Teamwork shares a lot of good practices with parenting. This lesson was no exception …. I realised fairly early on in my time as a parent that I had a tendency to fail, bigtime, by blasting my kids for something they hadn’t done. The pattern became evident: I see something, I conclude they are rogues and bad actors, I give them both barrels, then after the tears are mopped up it…
When I was recruiting the fabulous Chris McDowall for a job, he asked me “why do YOU work here?” I replied that I was learning lots. He then said the most important thing anyone has said to me this decade: “ what are you learning?” 
 I goldfished for a few seconds and then had to say, “I can’t remember right now, but it’s all GOOD STUFF.” See, I…
I was asked for comment by Bill Bennet from the NZ Herald, for a piece on Kiwi startups moving to Silicon Valley. He built a nice little article , in which “Torkington says” features heavily. My policy is that if I email journalists, I’ll blog my side of the conversation for transparency’s sake. 
 I had two more comments responding to ideas he’d thrown in email,…
In this internal 1972 DEC memo (PDF) about the PDP-16 re-release, modern tech companies should find plenty of familiar territory: 
 
 While the PDP-16 has been marginally successful to date,
some problems have been noted.
1. Since the product, in its present form, is relatively
 complex, it is difficult to train salesmen.
2. Since the product is currently offered as a set…
I moderated a panel today at Gather on the topic of “Work”. We had representatives from different types of work: self-employed, salaried employee, startup, and investor. As moderator, my role wasn’t to share my opinions. Fortunately, on the Internet I’m also blogger, and my role as a blogger is to share my opinions. So: opinion follows. 
 The whole concept of…
“Digital citizenship” is a phrase I encounter often in my educational travels. Rather than merely teach how to use software and hardware, we should realize that students are citizens in an online world and teach them how to live in such a place. It sounds good on the surface, but there’s a whole contested idea of what “citizenship” is that I hadn’t begun to…
Telecom New Zealand is changing its name to Spark . Most commentators regard it as a backward move, most recently Lance Wiggs who diagnoses marketing capture, distraction from executive and board, and the death of a valuable brand. 
 I’d like to respectfully disagree. 
 I might be a contrarian, but I think it’s a good idea. First, let me quickly disregard that idea that Telecom…
I caught up with Jesse Robbins at Foo Camp, and he gave me a great line that I remember as being something like: “I’m going on an adventure. The outcome is uncertain, there will be setbacks along the way, so I’ll surround myself with good travelling companions.” 
 I’m going on a new adventure. This week saw me join the fast-growing Kiwi education startup, Hapara…
Andreas Schleicher runs the PISA programme for the UN. PISA is the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, a test given to 15-year-old students from most of the world. Data about the students, countries, and education systems are analysed to see not just who is high-performing and who is improving, but why. He came to New Zealand in July, and his talk to Members of Parliament was…
(this post is about the New Zealand education system. I wanted to say more than Twitter made easy) 
 NZ has an amazing education system. We went through the “Tomorrow’s Schools” revolution in the 1990s, which devolved governance of schools to the communities in which those schools sit. A Remuera school will teach and value different things than an Otara school, despite being…
The NZ Arts Foundation has launched Boosted , a way to crowdfund arts projects. Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering “don’t we already have several ways of doing that? I mean, Kiwi artists have already used Kickstarter and PledgeMe to fund projects.” 
 Boosted’s key point of difference is that, being operated by a charitable non-profit, your…
Kiwi Foo Camp just ended. This year, I collected Twitter handles as part of registration and I wanted to create a Twitter list. Twitter doesn’t provide an easy way to do this: you’re supposed to visit each person’s Twitter page and then add them to the list. Many clicks, many hours, no way is that fun. 
 
 
 ttytter to the rescue! Follow the website’s…
Katherine Mansfield is New Zealand’s literary icon: feminist, bisexual, incredibly gifted, part of the Bloomsbury circle of clever people pushing literary form before she died of tuberculosis. Her short stories are as moving today as they were when she wrote them almost 100 years ago. Her papers, and those of her husband John Middleton-Murry, are held at the National Library in Wellington as…
Things I learned while I was too busy to write week notes: 
 
 if you don’t do it, it won’t get done (“delegate” qualifies as “doing”); 
 learning to delegate is as hard as learning to do the task itself was, and you’ve got to learn to delegate NOW; 
 (related) setting it up so it can be done without you is much harder than doing it…
(belated) 
 Monday was a big day: I confirmed the hiring of my first employee, and gave a seminar at Auckland University on open research. The employee is my sister (getting back into the workforce after five years out with son; has been helping me out as book-keeper during that time), she’s part-time (four hours a day), and our goal is to have her help me scale the business. I know the…
Ok, so it’s been a while since my last week report. Sorry, habits are hard to form. 
 Family flew back from our Colorado trip, landing Sunday morning. The great thing about “computer work” is that one can do it anywhere, so I was able to work while I was away. The bad thing about “computer work” is that one can do it anywhere, so I was working while my family were…
It’s always seemed strange to me that local broadcasters would hold off broadcasting Dr Who, Mad Men, and other high-profile shows. Viewers chatter about it as soon as an episode airs in its country of origin, so regional fans either have the episode ruined by net spoilers or disconnect until the episode airs locally. The situation has improved enormously from the days of six month or…
Judge David Harvey has stepped down from the Kim DotCom case. At NetHui last week, he led a discussion of copyright where opinions from the floor were variously thoughtful, passionate, and novel. He was careful to watch his words, at one point saying “I’d better not say anything about that” when other trials he has came up. He didn’t mention Dotcom, and the conversation…
Most of us have a case of “you don’t know what you don’t know”: we don’t know the range of what’s possible, so we continue doing things as we’ve seen them done before but with slight improvements. I think of it as being in a dark room: by looking at other schools, talking to other teachers, and meeting other school boards, we can shine a torch into the…