This, that, here & now

I’ve chatted to a few people at tech companies recently and I’ve observed a pattern. The AI coding advancements that are sticking are being driven by a) Principal engineers (or other very senior IC engineers) who b) are writing lots of code.

This is interesting to me because often Principal engineers have become Principal engineers through stopping writing lots of code and instead doing a complex combination of teaching, sharing ideas, demonstrating good decision making, pattern matching and business case understanding.

Hello! Last year I wrote a list of 52 things I enjoyed in 2023, shared it at work and people seemed to like it so I thought I’d do it again. Also I liked compiling it as it gave me a chance to reflect on things that had crossed my interest threshold last year and the patterns in my reading and video watching. There were lots of nice moments where I was like “oh yeah I went down that rabbit hole of indie websites in April, that was fun!”.

So here are 52 things I enjoyed in 2024. I hope you find one or two that you enjoy too.

52 things I enjoyed in 2024

1. The best thing I saw all year is Dua Lipa’s original Tiny Desk Concert from the pandemic. I watched it at least 40 times. I had not consciously listened to a Dua Lipa song until I sat down to watch her set at Glastonbury in August. At the end of the year she was my top played artist, and I was in the top 0.5% of listeners.

2. I thought and read a lot about blogs and blogging, and having an independent web presence this year. That theme will show up in a few links I expect, including this philosophy for maintaining a digital garden, a personal space on the web.

3. The hottest restaurant in France is an all you can eat buffet. (Also best title of the year?)

4. I was a bit obsessed by this user experience prototype where someone experimented with building a single stream of their total digital lift.

5. It turns out modernity killed Dracula.

This is an essay that was published in Public Digital’s Signals 2 periodical (“Conditions for Success”). It’s fallen off the internet so I’m republishing here.

The best digital teams I’ve worked on give off a buzz when they are working. Even on very large teams, with hundreds of people working in a shared environment, there is an energy, a feeling of stuff getting done.

Sometimes, though, that energy is missing. I’ve worked on projects like that, I’m sure you have too. Instead of energy and harmony, there’s friction. People sitting just feet apart don’t know each other’s names, let alone what the other teams are working on.

I read this great article about Heroku by someone who used to work there. You may have heard that Heroku had a huge data breach, where all of the access tokens it was storing for Github integration were compromised. This makes me sad because it will probably be the final nail in the Heroku coffin, and Heroku is a lot of the reason that I’m doing the job I do today.

• Sometimes people ask me if I’m technical and I don’t really know how to reply to this question. To most software developers I say “not really”, which I judge by the fact that I’ve never written production code for a system before (well, I have once, story for another day) but I have given out a lot of opinions on how that should happen. So I’m roughly trying to say something along those lines — take my words with the caveat that I’ve never done your job.

July - December 2019

So, in the second half of last year I didn’t get round to publishing what I’d read. Luckily I still kept the record, so here’s an update. It’s missing a lot of articles but the books are here. Things slowed down quite a lot as I was working again and we had our second daughter in August, two kids doesn’t leave a huge amount of time for reading!

In 2019 I read 21 books, and a lot of New Yorker articles (I’ve put a few stand outs below). Nearly 2 books a month feels a bit ahead of where I’ll get to this year. 2019 is really a year of two halves, 14 books in the first 6 months, 7 in the second (after Lily was born).

Books

• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan — I read this after loving the excerpt in the New Yorker. It reminded me I’d always dreamed of learning to surf. It was good to start with but I couldn’t finish it. Two reasons: 1. I feel like he never really described whatever was driving him around the world in search of the perfect wave. He touched on family issues, not fitting in, self esteem…but never approached them with emotional honesty. 2. There are only so many times you can read a description of the minutiae of catching a wave.

April/May/June 2019

I’m back at work so reading is slowing down. A bit more variety and more New Yorker articles as I’m cracking on through the pile I’d built up. Only the articles I really enjoyed here.

Books

• Milkman by Anna Burns. Outstanding book. For anyone who has lived (or particularly grew up) in a culture of hierarchy, gaslighting, spoken and unspoken rules, anger and otherness. Can’t tell you how much this book churned me up, in a good way.

I haven’t done links in a while and I have a lot saved up so I’m going to do them in the style of Ann Friedmann and let you know some of what I’ve been reading about.

March 2019

Books

• Transit by Rachel Cusk — I’m reading the trilogy and marvelling at Cusk’s spare writing, her storytelling through the withdrawn narrator letting the other characters form the foreground whilst she emerges from the gaps in their stories. A new writing.

I’ve started to keep a small note of things I’ve read over the past few months and I thought it might be interesting to publish it here as the format I use (a really long note in Simplenote) can get a little unwieldy.

So here are some things I read in January and February. I’ll mainly keep it to books and longer bits of writing (that I’ve enjoyed in the latter case). I’m a subscriber to the New Yorker magazine so that will turn up quite a lot (and I was going through quite a big backlog in Feb!).

January 2019

Books

• Play it again by Alan Rusbridger — good read, lots of interesting musing on the theme of learning later in life. Found the Guardian stuff a little less interesting. Too much name dropping and self importance at times.

22. How technology grows (a restatement of definite optimism)

A very interesting article, arguing that as a society we need to invest in larger technological endeavours and move our economy away from reliance on services. Needs some rereading.

17. Santi Cazorla interview

One of those “what if?” scenarios. Santi Cazorla was Arsenal’s best player, the one who made our team hum and gave us the glimpse of a world in which we were playing beautiful football and winning. Here he describes the gruesome treatment he went through for his injury and subsequent major infection, which almost led to amputation. Beneath it all is the sunny, humble, funny demeanour that endeared him so much to Arsenal fans. I’m glad he’s playing again, and sad it is not in a red shirt.

11. The return of Simone Biles and the costs of Gymnastics

Watching Simone Biles is incredible, she is an athletic genius. This article looks at an issue that I think about quite a lot in other contexts, I tend to call it “soft failure”. US Gymnastics (as an organisation) is going through an incredibly challenging time in the wake of the systematic sexual abuse of gymnasts enabled by the structures in place in that organisation. What it needs to rebuild is a hard failure, a failure so epic that none of the things that came before it can be countenanced. A hard failure is what the sexual abuse scandal and information about the other psychological abuse that was going on in pursuit of gold medals should lead to.

6. Awesome maintainers

I’ve been following Nadia Eghbal’s work on open source economics, particularly looking at the people who maintain open source projects, for a few months. Her work is wide ranging and super interesting, and this is a great new project she has started (using the awesome list style that you know I love) to track people talking about the experience of being an open source maintainer. This is hugely valuable, reminding us that so much of our current software defined world is built on the back of the unstinting individuals who give up their own time and effort to keep these projects going.

Inspired by the way Ben Terrett does it I decided to collect links on my blog, what’s the point of having a blog if I don’t use it eh?

I love the tool loom. It’s a chrome extension that lets you quickly record videos and share them on the internet. It will record your desktop, what you are saying and even your camera if you want it to.

I found myself talking quite a lot about awesome lists recently. These are community curated lists of useful stuff, hosted on GitHub. If that sounds a little vague, it is because there are so many awesome lists that it’s hard to pin them down.

(cross posted on the drie blog)

Here at drie we think that platform as a service is genuinely effective as one tool in your toolkit for solving a wider business problem — how do I make the cost of IT change small.

Miranda July is one of my favourite writers. Her writing is invariably funny and disarming– she writes with a light touch as if her purpose is to do nothing more than give you a little peek into her way of living.