Chasing chokepoints

If you're puzzled why spending a fortune on agentic coding tools isn't helping you ship your software products any faster, there are two books you need to read to understand why.

22 August 2026 Continue reading →

The archive

Since 2002

2026-07-14 You can run a dozen coding agents. Your dev environment can only handle one.
2026-07-13 Quality, cost, time - pick all three
2026-05-02 Printing a missing dividing head plate
2026-04-29 Claude learned to estimate from the best of us
2026-03-07 It’s never what you expect it to be
2026-03-03 Fail-safe prompting for Git access by Claude etc
2025-07-09 Setting up VLANs on Unifi gear
2025-05-27 Over-caffeinated juniors
2025-05-11 Recently 19 - Sporadic
2025-04-10 Setting up Shelly wifi smoke alarms
2025-04-07 IBAN checking with Typescript
2025-03-31 Some thoughts after playing around with Claude Code
2025-03-18 Power & Politics for Engineers: L8Conf, Warsaw
2025-01-24 Automating a dumb washing machine
2025-01-16 How to update your address with the immigration authorities in Germany, 2025 edition
2025-01-16 Nobody cares
2025-01-15 There’s some really glaring rough edges on Apple Maps
2025-01-14 Crayon-tier explanations
2025-01-08 Controlling a ESP8266 HW-364B OLED board with Micropython
2024-11-29 Monitoring fuel levels with lasers and ultrasound
2024-11-10 Pulling data off a power meter with a Raspberry Pi and Modbus
2024-10-16 Recently 42 - (Literally) new horizons
2024-09-10 Recently 36 - Not Quite There Yet
2024-09-03 Deploying an Eleventy site to render.com
2024-08-21 How to manage a statically-generated website from iOS devices
2024-08-21 Keeping email uncluttered with a "waiting for" folder
2024-08-19 My information management process
2024-06-20 Half-Assing a Web Game with ChatGPT and Friends
2024-05-29 Running Jest tests alongside an Express server
2024-05-01 Data Rention
2024-04-07 In Praise of My Toaster
2024-04-05 Does It Move A Scooter?
2024-03-29 Interacting with a JMAP API - a rapid-start
2024-03-19 Bearblogging
2024-03-19 LinkedIn, how I loathe thee
2024-03-09 Pummelvision
2024-03-08 Sleepwalking into a new dark age
2024-02-25 Setting up a Typescript-based Node project: the basics
2024-02-10 Enjoy the ride
2023-11-06 Stack-based versus queue-based
2023-11-06 git rm cynicism && git commit && git push
2023-11-04 The single most useful organisational hack you can apply to an email inbox
2023-10-28 Blog posting from Bear
2023-10-27 Managing Multiple Github Accounts On One Machine
2022-09-08 Loading environment variables in NextJS tests
2021-09-24 Nouns, adjectives, verbs, and your minimum viable product
2021-08-20 Congrats, it’s time to worry about scaling
2020-06-27 Creating tables with UICollectionView in iOS14
2020-03-05 A minimum viable intro to NSDiffableDataSource, Composable Layouts and UICollectionViews
2020-02-21 Unit-testing a JSON-serving API with Express
2020-02-18 Password-protecting websites served from S3
2020-01-14 Orchestras
2020-01-03 Automating Cloudfront invalidations in an continous deployment setup
2020-01-03 Why knowing nothing about everything doesn't make you 'senior'
2019-12-29 Nailing Up a Typescript and Jest Project
2019-11-18 Testing asynchronous functions with Jest
2019-11-17 Long-term file storage with S3
2019-10-27 Configuring GitLab CI
2019-10-26 Web serving with AWS and continuous deployment
2018-05-17 The Manager's Path - the guts of chapters 5 and 6
2018-05-16 The Manager's Path - guts of the first three chapters
2018-05-16 The Manager's Path - the guts of chapters 4 and 5
2017-05-28 Asynchronous testing of non-callback code in Swift
2017-05-04 Outboard brains, or how to form habits without forming habits
2017-04-30 Testing throwing functions in Swift
2015-10-02 Testing asynchronous code in Swift
2015-09-30 Mocks and expectations with Swift
2013-11-18 Universal priciples
2013-07-25 Batch resizing of images with Mogrify
2013-06-17 Exploitation
2013-04-06 Hacking the government's kebabs
2013-03-17 Hot Otter Action Near You
2012-11-26 ParlyHack 2012
2012-06-26 How to do hackdays right
2011-09-08 Goodbye Delicious, hello Pinboard
2011-08-31 "I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit"*
2011-08-30 The Ad Contrarian: Advertising And The Future Of Apple
2011-08-27 Richard Stallman
2011-05-24 My Git workflow
2011-05-04 Git For Cowards
2011-04-26 Dog turds as a metaphor for business banking
2011-03-27 Paging Baron Pandastein
2010-11-17 Interesting North
2010-11-04 Scraping red dots
2010-07-28 t'Big Society in t'North
2010-06-10 The People's Front Of @BCS
2010-06-08 Dog sonar
2010-03-28 Rewired Culture
2010-03-04 Vodafone, apps, and dumb pipes in the sky
2009-09-13 Morse Code at Interesting