Weblog

I was listening to Search Engine's most recent episode: "How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation". You should listen to it, but after you've read this blog post. PJ, the host, is chatting with David Pierce from The Verge about their persistent fears about their, and...

I really had a streak going in March 2025, huh. Here are some things I've been doing that aren't writing blog posts: Taking photos of beautiful, natural things… during daylight ! Putting everything I own into a thousand boxes. Riding my bicycle without having to wear four layers. Seeing family...

This is a short book review for 'Everything is Tuberculosis' by John Green. Here are some (non-affiliate) links: UK and US. — I have looked to John Green, for a long time, as a role model for how to make sense of the world when the information one gets from...

I've been getting more into photography over the last year. I wanted a place to put my photos that wasn't "I guess I'll build my own blog (again)", and also wasn't an extension of Mark and/or people Mark approves of (yuck) Anyway, I found glass.photo: "a home for our photography...

I think I was wrong about notes A few weeks back I wrote, somewhat skeptically, asking if I should be taking notes while reading. I asked if doing so would ever be worth the investment. Well, to be precise, I said: I have a job, and a human body, and...

Instead of pretending I'm writing this in early March, let's just cover February and two weeks of March 2025 in this one. Improbably crocuses Nature's dormant winter is never ending and then spring happens. The early snowdrops and daffodils, and then crocuses and cherry blossom are quite ignorant of our...

When Apple announced their suite of Apple Intelligence features in 2024, they did so nearly two whole years after OpenAI announced both DALL·E, their image generation tool, and ChatGPT, their chat-like interface to a Large Language Model. For whatever reason, these later tools were the starting pistol to the "can...

These tools can generate almost effortless outputs. They unburden us from the abrasion of creativity and their generic-by-design results keep us cocooned from the risks of standing out. No one wants to make ‘ugly’ art, or a ‘bad’ website. But struggling and making mistakes is an important part of developing...

For most mortals, nothing is as beneficial to learning as asking questions and receiving answers. This is the core of a Socratic Dialogue, a technique made famous by the Ancient Greek philosopher but I'm fairly confident that two people had spoken back-and-forth on a single topic at some point in...

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden. There's something in my brain that's really trying to chew through this idea of storing various kinds of personal knowledge together and linking them oh my god i'm inventing the internet. mymind. An no-advertising (yes!) no-social (yay) AI-powered (oh!) alternative to...

If the YouTube content algorithm knows one thing about me, it's that I love Second Brains / Smart Notes / Digital Gardens. I hear a lot more about these ideas from people who like ideas. I don't hear a lot about them from people producing substantial creative output (whatever that...

About a decade ago I was doing my doctoral studies in education technology. As well as the obligatory, ambient research reading I recall doing a lot of "challenging" reading during this time: Steinbeck's East of Eden (after which I got my first tattoo), Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style (which...

I think a lot of Normal People (TM) think that the internet is social media. Recreationally, I don't think a lot of people move far from Meta's Facebook or Instagram, ByteDance's TikTok, Alphabet's YouTube, or X's… X (?). I don't think that's changing. I think that most people will continue...

January gets a bad wrap. As someone with a January birthday I try not to take it personally. I also spent the first three weeks of January 2025 intentionally between jobs - being free of work commitments, but assured of upcoming employment, I personally found this to be a most...

The following is an extract from a letter I sent to my MP in January 2025 to express my concerns about Shein's attempts to make an initial public offering (IPO), while continuing to source cotton from slave labour. I post it because this year I want to take seriously my...

December comes to us, mild in temperament and temperature this year. Although this season didn't see quite the Grand Social Obligations Tour that previous festive periods have, the household has remained busy (and largely healthy) through December, something to always be celebrated. The month contained moments of great personal and...

I used to write a Vibe Check blog post at the end of each month. I haven't written one for six or seven months, and I miss writing them. But also I have been busy. Mists on the River Thames The view from Brill Hill November 2024 was a very...

Tl;dr: Dockerfile is at the bottom of this blog post. I wrote last week about using Coolify to deploy a Ghost blog platform with just a Dockerfile (like, text pasted into a textarea on a web interface). That's really cool - and (to me) the power fantasy of OSS, without...

In the past few weeks I've been doing a lot of non-fiction reading about about god. About the claims made about god in religion, individual people's ideas about god, and the place of god within religion and religion within society. Pretty big stuff, to be honest. It's been really interesting....

I think I might like a place to publish content (photos, some longer-form writing) that doesn't feel like it belongs on my personal, tech-centric blog. I chose Ghost, an open-source platform for publishers or content-creators. The first ever blog that I spun up during my postgrad studies was a Ghost...

It might be my specific internet bubble, but two phrases I hear a lot online are: "this is just my opinion" or "this is just how it feels to me". I implore you: stop using these phrases. Stop using them in situations where subjective opinion or personal preference are the...

Recently I thought "maybe it's about time my tests run in CI" for one of my side-projects (herearethose.photos, a site for quickly and privately sharing photos). The Problem Using GitHub actions, it's possible to set job-level environment variables, and step-level environment variables. But what if you need to set an...

Link to the original article from Nikhil Suresh. I came across this article on Hacker News, and gave it my full attention this Friday, with a glass of wine. It's from the same author that gave us I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again I had the...

I was listening to the most recent episode of the Decoder podcast (link) with the creator of the Arc Browser, Josh Miller. Arc is a web browser, so naturally he was asked something like "why compete with Google's Chrome browser?", and he said something that resonated: What we’re focused on...

While listening to an episode of the Syntax Podcast, I heard one of the hosts say something like: I am a Never Adobe kind of person. And I love this idea. Because my perception of Adobe, as someone who has a passing interest in making better photographs, is a company...

I owe a lot of the things I like about myself to the Cortex Podcast. When I was a different person I was listening to the podcast on a bike, cycling alone through central France. One of the hosts said something like: You know what creators do? They create. It...

Hello, again. Nature is telling me that summer is over. Or at least that calling this late August summer is stretching the truth. The days are getting shorter. The wind has a cold bite to it. The squirrels want nothing more than to de-head the seeding plants and cache food...

It's that time of year when I intentionally set-aside the guilt of not writing all the blog posts I want to, in favour of spending time outside. In the great tradition, I'll be on Summer Hours for the next few months. Spending times outside, ideally eating and drinking good food....

This a review of the book Matrix by Lauren Groff (link). It's been hard to find time to read in 2024, namely because I'm planning a wedding (blaming something on wedding planning - that's Wilson Bingo 2024). When I find myself in reading slumps, small books, especially small literary books...

My very first serious software product was built in Ruby on Rails, around 2014. Ruby is a programming language with a relatively small, but happiness-oriented, community around it, and Rails is a framework for building web applications in Ruby. Around 2010, Rails was the framework to build things in. Twitter...

I recently wrote about my thoughts on generative AI. The quality and capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to command our attention, and companies are generally trying to stick them anywhere. In apps (like Notion) and in little computers you can pin to your chest like the Apple Broach...

tl;dr source code for extracting notes and highlights from a kindle-made .html file. Since 2020 I've been running Obsidian as my notes app of choice. The hacker in me likes that it's just .md files all the way down (basically). One of the things I like to do in Obsidian...

I think I left this Vibe Check too late into April and I sort of forgot what happened in March. Luckily: my blog, my rules. I declare bankruptcy for March 2024, and find myself acquitted of all charges. These last six weeks have been Classic British Spring: there have been...

I'm going to argue in this piece that using AI models to generate for-human text is good professionally, but not creatively. The most extreme interpretation of my opinion is that a liberal reliance on AI-generated text is bad for people at work and play. I'm going to talk mostly about...

This is a blog post about automated testing in software. One of the most useful thoughts I've had about testing is that writing tests is like meditation: The goal isn't to be good at it. The goal is to do it. I had an interesting interaction at work the other...

Something I know about myself is that I learn best when I make lots of quick attempts at something. This works better for me than spending longer on each individual step. Like when I learned to make clothes: I had an awful lot of unwearable garments. I think it's fun...

It's March 2024, I'm on a long weekend holiday in The Lake District and the Website Redesign Fever came over me. I think it looks good, or at least simpler. It reflects my continued radicalisation into Plain Text, informed (heavily) by marginalia. I also took this chance to bump from...

I wanted to know how many files that ended in either .test.ts or .test.js in a directory, came up with this guy: Tree tree is a tool for listing out the contents of a directory in a tree-style format. \--noreport Removes a summary line at the bottom ("10 directories, 35...

February 2024 was quite nice, to be honest. The weather ended up being less dry and more windy, so it became harder to get out on the bike. Which was a shame, after weeks of still, dry weather. Such is the nature of a false spring. It's got to to...

I've had these thoughts in my head for a while, Dave Rupert published a piece a few weeks ago. Which really had me in the first half, it's worth a read. I re-downloaded Duolingo in January (quelle cliché) and maybe three weeks later booted that owl right off of my...

I don't know, man, every ninth moon cycle something comes over me and asks "remember how you learned software engineering using vim and rails and that was sort of it?" That time has come, all aboard Steam Train Vim. Specifically, I found Lazy Vim, a neovim setup, which I am...

January 2024 was a lovely month, really. We ended up celebrating a few delayed Christmases, so the festive period itself didn't tear through my stamina. It also meant that I didn't really feel The Blues, because every other week I was going to a family household and getting wined and...

Let's get into some real 2018 Wilson shit and talk about writing comments in code. Comments are bits of text that developers leave in code files that are explicitly marked as "please ignore" to the computer who reads the computer instructions. They are written messages from one developer to another....

The vibes were good, mostly. Things got a bit dicey for a moment, especially in the first half of the year. I left a job that I was good at, largely enjoyed, and where I really respected the people. I've been more engaged in the day-to-day of making and moulding...

Since at least 2019 I have done Yearly Themes, which I heard of from the fine folks at Cortex Brand. 2023 was the Year of Tools, where I wanted to focus on the tools I use to do things (work things, fun things, any things). I spend a lot of...

December 2023's Vibe Check was started on gloomy December morning, and finished a fortnight later on cosy December night. Context changes things. Winds and rain (both freezing) stopped what was a mild winter. "Winter's not too bad" I thought, like someone who's never lived through a winter. We're into the...

Mocking isn’t inherently a bad thing. They can simulate expensive (time, computation, money) external dependencies like database or third-party services. Though these integrations should have some level of integration test, this shouldn’t be a dependency for unit-level, or sibling/dependent software. However, overly liberal use can lead to a brittle test...

In the past couple of months I have spent a lot of time looking at CVs. I found a new job, hired a replacement for my old job, and helped several friends and colleagues find new jobs. As an aside: the market for software engineers is correcting from over-demand and...

The past few Vibe Checks happened between one-to-ten days after the month ended. Today it happens a few days preceding. The preparedness. October 2023 has been a delightful month. We've had our first few proper cold-snaps (the heating isn't yet on a schedule, though); the astonishing bright oranges and deep...

About three years ago (several months into a novel coronavirus pandemic) I decided I wanted to learn to sew, and about a year ago I started to get pretty serious about sewing my own wardrobe. To do this, I have had to really engage with pattern drafting. That's the act...

September 2023 was definitely the end of summer. As I write this, the temperature remains balmy in the twenties, but it's dark at seven-thirty in the evening, and the days take turns towards the blusterous, or rain sprayed. All of the things that can only happen in summer - gatherings...

The goal isn't it be good at it. The goal is to do it....

tl;dr The Questions Can you give me an example? If the candidate is using all of the right words ("feedback", "delivery", "tests") - pick (any) one of them, and try to learn as much about an example as possible. What would you do instead? If you're hearing a lot of...

I'm going to level with you - I've found myself pretty deep into drafting my own sewing patterns. It all started with commercial patterns. These are pre-made patterns from established designers and companies that are traditionally graded. The patterns come with a set of sizes, to make the garment in,...

A younger, self-obsessed, version of me thought the details of "expertise" (completely devoid of context) were the secret. I think that attitude actually helped lay a pretty solid foundation to my professional past-lives, but I have tried hard to move on from it. I missed a few things, like the...

I think I first saw Dawson's book in a Sunday Times magazine, as a new release. The premise was that witches are real and the UK government has a coven (HMRC) of witches. There are spoilers after this paragraph. If that's not cool, stop reading here and immediately go to...

June 2023 was a pretty busy month. The company I work for went through a second round of redundancies and the software team (the team I lead) ended up being quite badly affected, and many of my colleagues were made redundant. I ended up doing a lot of mental and...

In January, I wrote about a tiny bot that I built in a week which goes to the "Upcoming Deliveries" page on ODDBOX (a fruit & veg delivery company in the UK), does some simple HTML scraping to find what fresh food I can expect to have delivered, and then...

Summer's coming in, which is pretty great. I love the summer (old news and a lukewarm take). I've found myself fulfilled over the last eight-ten weeks. I have seen one of my closest friends get married, I've finished multiple sewing projects (I'm wearing a Snout Street shirt right now, a...

I came across a link to Always the Same Warning Signs (science.org) while browsing Hacker News. It goes over some of the warning signs around revolutionary (and lucrative) commercial science breakthroughs, like in pharmacology. Specifically, what if it seems too good to be true. The piece gives three warning signs...

It has been 29 (twenty-nine) days since I last wrote and published something . I have things I want to say but, even more, I have things I want to do. Here are some of the things I've been doing instead of writing: Planning a wedding (including building a bespoke...

By nature I am very opinionated, so I try hard to make my opinions changeable. It's the least I can do for other people. There are a handful of beliefs that you shouldn't flex on. One such belief is that the kinds of problems I like working with demand deep...

I went for coffee with a friend today. We were talking about how to make sense of it all. The big stuff. We were talking about the things you should not burn: health, youth, relationships. Those things will, if sustained, sustain you. Or, more pessimistically, they are the things you...

I find myself writing this a full two (2!) weeks into April. It's been seventeen days since I last wrote anything, which feels unusual. My brain feels it: I've taken more and more detailed notes (at work, in life) in the last five-or-so days. I wrote the notes for this...

There's a one-two combo with some kind of hard problems: you have to ask "what do I need to do?" and then "how do I know if that worked?". Surprise! It's actually a three-punch combo (pow!). It is even harder if you do something, but won't quickly or easily see...

If you could build something (start to finish) in six weeks, and worked worked evenly (and relentlessly) for all fifty-two weeks of the year, you would build about eight and a half products in a year. It is now (checks watch) nearly April (?!) Have you built those two things?...

As I write this (March 2023), we're (hopefully) past peak-hype for ChatGPT, and into the phase where we start to find the boundaries and limitations. Or at least temporary limitations before the next language model addresses them. As a very up-front statement of a dystopian future: large language models (like...

The Vibe check is a series of monthly blog posts where I think back to the past month. Today I'm talking about February 2023. Music and Film Recs Cha Cha Real Smooth (film; drama). This is the best film I've seen so far this year. Without being self serving or...

Asking "what's the opposite?" is a question I use a lot when talking about problems and solutions. That means asking questions like "what does this person not need to hear from me?" or "what would the least useful version of this look like?". If you're stuck, paralysed by choice, or...

Earlier this week I wrote a piece, The exceptions are more interesting. Tl;dr - unless you're extremely careful at work, ideas/advice/theories become platitudes, and therefore less useful. My brain isn't finished with the idea, I think the point I want to make is: It is tempting to prefer talking in...

Let's say there's two kinds of work: The kind where you take something not good and make it good. The kind where you take nothing, and make it into something. I have spent a lot more time doing the first kind of work, making something better. I have spent a...

Tests should drive the development of software (caveat caveat backtrack backtrack). That means if you find yourself somewhere in the codebase making some kind of change, it should be because the test took you there. If you're not careful, you're somewhere because it was nearby and it looked or smelled...

In the early 2010s, when I was a post-grad (not a professional), I started writing online. And my first blog was on Medium.com. And the writing experience there was excellent. I think that was one of my earliest "a website can do that?!" moments. I don't want to forget that...

Edit: Ironically, this post is a little too generic. My thinking got a bit clearer in The Meta is More Appealing. Thomas 2023-02-19. I'm going to open with three buzzwords and a bland sentiment: Theories, policies, and frameworks are useful. Things like "do the uncertain things first" or "automate the...

Everyone everywhere says last year flew by. Contrarian by nature, it 2022 felt like it took about a year. January 2023, however, felt like it took about a week. I'm looking forward to the next few weeks being a more eventful, more different, and (hopefully) passing a little more slowly....

I recently wrote about the Sunrise, Sunset? game. It's a Wordle-style daily game where you have to decide if a photo is a sunrise or a sunset. This is a (very rough) log I wrote while building that. Day Zero: What ? Over the festive break, someone (definitely not fiancée)...

tl;dr - I made a daily game to guess if a picture is sunrise or sunset. Here's the link. Over the festive break I got into a discussion (?) with my fiancée. She said that she could look at a picture and know if it was a sunrise or sunset....

Earlier this month I wrote about a side project I built which tells me about my upcoming vegetable box delivery (link). 99% of software I have ever deployed (non-professionally) has been monolithic. It has been a single process that spins up a web server (Rails, Express, Spring Boot). If they're...

tl;dr : I wrote a serverless app (AWS, terraform) that scrapes the Oddbox "upcoming deliveries" page once a day, and sends me an e-mail with the contents so that I never have to check manually. Here's the github link. For the past two years I've been an Oddbox customer. It's...

This is a list of my favourite albums of 2022. They're not the best records, they're my favourite. In 2018 and 2019 I made a real effort to create some (nicely art-directed) lists like this. Then I let them rot and for three years I didn't want to write another...

I welcomed in 2023 with a board game (Ticket to Ride, got my ass served to me wholesale by my fiancée) and a double dram of The Lake's Distillery Whisky Maker's Reserve #5, which I nursed lovingly for several hours. It was quite the quiet affair. I enjoyed observing the...

Winter came to Oxford in the last seven or ten days. The other day I stepped out of my house and got that Winter in England smell that I forget for six months of the year, and alternately resent and treasure in for the other six. It's the smell of...

As a novice software engineer I thought that problems were technical. Or that the hard or "real" problems were technical. I thought that they were about knowing which steps to take, or the magic words that the compiler/runtime wanted me to type. As a novice software engineering leader, I believe...

I got a Steam Deck in September (huge flex), and so October 2022 saw the resurgence of video games into my life. As a teenager I spent the normal amount of time playing games (thank you) and took a lot of pleasure from it. I wasn't a gapital-G-Gamer, but I...

The hard thing about most ideas is arriving at them. Most ideas themselves are easy. For example: Many smaller changes to software reduces the chance that a single change can break things. People who exercise more are more likely to live longer. Everyday somebody is discriminated against because of where...

Good software adds value to the people who use it. So good software engineers make software that adds value to peoples' lives. People get value from what software does for them, not how it does it (obvious caveats about correctness aside). It's possible for highly valuable software to be terrible...

Software is improved iteratively. Large changes come through in many small changes. Good software can flex easily. I like to think of the large changes as the brightest stars in the sky - they help you navigate the ship. You do not want to lose the brightest stars in the...

It's been two months since my last vibe check. We've reached the bookend sub-seasons where morning, afternoon, and evening each require their own outfit. Three layers in the morning, one layer at lunch, then two layers in the evening. It's maddening. The more diminutive amongst the trees have already surrendered...

tl;dr Do everything you can to understand the bugs your software team introduce, and the cost of fixing them. If you over-index on bugs, things might get called a "bug" when it's not. Deploying a change to recently introduced features doesn't mean there was a bug, it might mean there...

On a recent holiday in The Lake District I wasn't able to find a complete list of the Wainwright fells online, in a concise way that I could use to track the height and location of the hills. A few hours in the morning later and I've compiled a list...

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a way of writing software where the author writes a test first, and then writes the "actual" code. The "actual" code here is the bits of software which do the dirty work. They might process a payment and then send a receipt e-mail. Let's call...

I am leading hiring efforts for my small engineering team. We're looking for our third senior engineer (maybe five years of experience shipping code, and a little bit of time leading some technical or pastoral efforts). Our technical interview process runs some one-to-two hours and starts with a problem. Something...

Summer 2022 isn't over (take if from my red, sunburned hands) but I'm back from not thinking about writing. Everything in seasons, and taking active rest has been great....

Vibe Check #5 We're over half way through the year. Which is good. The second half of the year is definitely my favourite half, with late summer, autumn, and Christmas ahead. I'm gearing up for my personal summer out-of-office. During which I will be mostly in-office, but using all my...

Five years ago when I was writing software I was working around the question "what should go in this file?". Now it's more often "what thing am I making, and where does it fit with the other things?". As a more experienced engineer, my decisions about what things we have,...

Every year my brain tricks me. June, it says, June is summer. And every year around this time I get long daylight hours but seemingly endless wind, rain, and rarely-over-twenty temperatures. Some days have been beautiful, but many (like today) are unadventurous. I sit inside a cafe to write. The...

When I joined the company (2020) there were less than a hundred tests across three codebases. This week, we hit one thousand tests. We've increased the pathways in our code covered by tests from one in five (~20%) to one in two (~50%). Here are the five most important practices...

On a recent train from Oxford to London (and back again), I built a litte widget to help calculate the cost of a meeting. Or at least, the simple cost of the salary of people attending a meeting. You can find it here on my personal site....

Three of the past four weeks have been a four-day work week. It's been wonderful. And yet still I'm posting this a week later than I'd like. The weather has been overcast, but everything in balance, even good weather. Still, some rain would be nice. To burden the spring metaphor...

Prologue Hi there, this is 🔮 Future Thomas 🔮 here. I'm re-reading this post while editing and, my friend, a lot of the first-draft of this post sounded like borderline heresy and also like the Remix framework and its team had personally wronged me. It's not and they haven't. I've...

A few weeks ago I was working on some change in our codebase. One thing lead to another and the diff I submitted spanned eighty-some files, and over a thousand lines of modified code (adds, removes, and modifies). The first question I was asked in the sync code review was...

Answering and executing the question(s) "what do we build and how do we build it?" is an existential challenge for small companies. What you build is probably more important than how you build it. But how you build it changes how well you can change it. And the what is...

March 2022 has been a good month for me. December-January saw me feeling very mentally strained, in retrospect because we're seeing the remnants of covid restrictions lift. personal and professional obligations are changing, and as an introvert they're drawing from an already shallow well of extrovert energy. I've not felt...

Code changes frequently, and good code is able to change easily. That means that code must be both simple for other humans to interpret (so that the code is changed, not duplicated or added on to), and anti-brittle (so that changes don't require rewrites, or re-considerations). An (understandable) response to...

The flavour of a test block lies in the calling of application code, and the assertions on its behaviour. Everything else (set-up, tear down, tidying, and side effects) dilutes a test. Work to prevent tests from being watered down. It should be as obvious to an incoming engineer exactly what...

It's basically March and the days are finally getting longer! On Sunday, the sun was up to greet me as I made coffee. Tiny sweet peas and strawberries bud on the window sill. The flow of spring into winter feels miraculous. It's getting lighter, but it's secretly the coldest, wettest...

I spoke to thirty founders, and they all do these three things before breakfast. My nine journaling prompts for other CEOs and founders One rule for flawless interviews. \[and so on] Habit hacks are catnip to a certain kind of self-improvement/business-guru people. I actually got pretty involved in these kinds...

January 2022 was a good month. It's weird how slow the start of the year feels, until it's over. The days get longer, and it feels like momentum is returning to my life, which is cool. Some highlights from this month include: Turning 30, taking the day off work, and...

Imagine you're part of a new-ish, in-house engineering team working with a legacy codebase. How do you extend this codebase into new features while discovering and fixing Dark Patches on that same codebase's map? I actually don't know, and myself and the rest of the engineering team at Oxwash have...

In the past four months I've hired about five software engineers (including interns). So I've been thinking about how we onboard new engineers to the team. This has been especially important because over half the engineers have never had an engineering job before, or even a job as a university...

Over the past two months I have inherited leadership of an engineering team I have worked in for the last twelve months. In the last two weeks I've seen the speed of development go from not-slow, to almost inarguably fast (given current resource constraints). I've spent months slowly attempting to...

After a year and a half of very new normal, summer 2021 was pretty perfect. I mean, the weather wasn't summery, being around a lot of strangers (and even friends) felt odd, and there seemed an awful lot of pressure to make this The Best Summer Ever. I'm pretty grateful...

Summer has always been a time for doing and living. It doesn't feel right to force at least one piece of writing out of my brain every week. Discipline and routine are useful tools for living, but so is taking a summer break. I'm going out of office for the...

The Weekly is a series of essays where I write on something I've been thinking about over the last seven days. They're under a thousand words. There's some stuff going on in my professional life (positive stuff, but still stuff, you know?) so it's going to be a short one...

I'm currently designing and building the lexicon, ambitiously explained as "the most useful language learning resources in the world". The problem is that there's a lot involved in that, you know? There's theoretical questions like "what does most useful mean?" and "how do humans learn languages"? Then there's small problems...

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The Weekly is a series of essays under one thousand words where I write about something I've been thinking over the last seven days. This week I want to talk about misinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding Covid-19, and why they're more harmful than previous conspiracy theories. I've been a little...

The Weekly is a weekly essay where I write about something I've been thinking about in the last seven days. They're under 1000 words, and this week I want to talk about vision and problems when you're building a new product. I'm building the lexicon, where I am (un-ironically) trying...

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The Weekly is a weekly essay on something I've been thinking about in the last seven days. They're less than a thousand words long. This week I want to talk about the metaphors we use when we talk about designing for the web. I read two (fantastic) pieces on the...

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The Weekly is a 1000-word-or-less essay on something I've been thinking this week. Let's talk about how productivity is (basically) a scam and how daily and weekly rituals are the backbone of any sane person's productivity. I once had the goal to move to Paris. I didn't achieve it (there...

Okay let's learn us how over the past 3000 years garlic has been espoused by healers and spiritual leaders to ward off disease and evil. It'll take you down a rabbit hole of medical advice, social segregation, and spiritual prohibition. Garlic (Allium Sativum, of theAllium genus) has set its roots...

I'm going to stop writing my "things I learned" blog posts. They don't serve me in the way that they used to. As I wrote recently: kill your ideas and side projects, gladly and without delay. Death is more of a transition, though. The things I learned this week post...

(This is a cross-post of a short article I wrote on LinkedIn) Stop me if you've heard any of these: "your call is valuable to us"… "on a scale of 1-10 how would you rate our…", "at {companyName} we care deeply about our customer experience…" Have you literally ever believed...

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(Not) Things I learned this week #38 This week seems to have really flown by. I've decided to take purposeful and intentional time for rest and personal recuperation this week. I'm not feeling burned out, but I could certainly smell some distant smoke on the wind. So here's to taking...

Your side-projects deserve a decisive, merciful death at your hands. You dragged them into this world, you'll fling them out. And do it quickly. I want to talk about killing our much beloved side-projects, and why this is totally a good idea. Then I want to talk about why this...

This week I've been focusing on perspective and gratitude. It's harder than it sounds if you feel things are unfair and not in your favour. But, to quote about a million throw cushions on Pinterest: you can't control life, only how you react to it. So this week I am...

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The cold snap in London is teasing us. Is it over? hopefully. But it will still be ~1C at night so don't get too complacent. Still, the days already feel long. I can hardly remember it being dark at 4pm but I'm sure I'll remember as soon as October comes....

I'm building DashDot: a privacy-focused interval training app that doesn't suck. The second cycle of development lasted March 15 - April 12. Let's look at where we are. Goals Here are the things I wanted to achieve in this cycle: ✅ Finalise the code architecture and restore tests ✅ Allow...

The slightly cold-snap here in London continues. The optimistic sewing and sprouting that took place in my garden (such as it is in urban West London) have largely had to retreat to the comfort of the indoors. Covid-related deaths continue to fall in the UK, as we begin optimistically opening...

I wrote this because of a paralysing problem in coding: how much should I design my new app's architecture before I dive into code if I can only learn about my app's architecture by coding it? I'm building Dash Dot, an interval timer iOS app from scratch, and this is...

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Things I Learned #34 We've made it to the Easter weekend. Spring has arrived here in London, which is to say it was 20 degrees C earlier this week and this morning it was 0, windy, and overcast. This time a year ago, my mental state was dominated by COVID-19...

This cassette revival: Last year's (2020's) sale of tape cassettes, the 90's mainstay of car sound systems and OG Walkmans (Walkmen?) were the highest they have been since 2003. An increase of 94% on 2019. Despite having inferior sound quality to CDs and vinyl, the medium is a lot cheaper...

Hello. I'm building an app called Dash Dot, it's a native iOS app for interval training that is a) well-designed, and b) privacy- and utility-focused. This post covers the first (approx.) six weeks in designing and building the app. I've never made a truly native app before (I have written...

Following on from International Women's Day last week, news of Sarah Everard's body being discovered broke on the 10th of March, a week after she went missing from Clapham, London. There have been subsequent vigils (and protests) to remind us all that violent and sexual crimes against women are under-reported...

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This week we celebrated International Women's Day. My love and support goes out to anyone who identifies with that label. Let's keep pushing for fair representation and pay, acknowledgement of domestic labour as work, and maybe some systemic government-backed support for domestic abuse victims and sex workers that doesn't involve...

How do you design a good app? It's a charmingly amateurish question, but I've spent the past five years primarily trying to design and build web apps and I don't know the answer. I regularly get sick of looking at my current and old designs and ask "why don't these...

These no longer fictional bridges: You know the bridges on the Euro notes? There are seven of them total (notes and bridges) which represent seven different architectural styles. They were originally designed in 2002 and were (at the time) fictitious bridges which didn't exist anywhere - so that no country...

Tl;dr Make sure you've got a repo on GitHub. Make sure you've got at least one set of tests in your Xcode codebase. Create the file below in yourproject/.github/workflows/main.yml: Replace the yourprojects and YourProjects with your file name git add .github/workflows/main.yml && git commit -m "Add test GitHub action" &&...

This lineage of cats: Chartwell House, in Kent, England, was the home of Winston Churchill. It's now owned and operated by the National Trust, a British institution, allowing visitors to see the gardens and houses. During Churchill's life, he had a marmalade (white and ginger) cat, called Jock. A few...

Clubhouse is a new audio social network platform for iOS. It's basically like having a moderated voice-only Zoom call. The entire network is largely three entities: Users: Human beings who use the app. Clubhouse have taken a pretty hard line on non-human (e.g. business) accounts. Rooms: Pre-scheduled or impromptu virtual...

This collective noun: If I was to make a list of small-talk and first date conversation topics it would go something like this: food, the tube, podcasts or books, and then collective nouns for animals. How many times have I been told the words "a parliament of owls" in my...

Hi, I'm Thomas. I'm a frontend engineer who's learning swift. Let's talk about closures in Swift from a very (very) introductory level. I'm assuming you've got some familiarity with JavaScript. You should definitely check out Apple's documentation on Closures, it's so much better than this page but also, like, less...

This seventeenth century petition: In 1674 in England, a pamphlet was made and published, titled The Women's Petition Against Coffee. The women (or alleged women, we don't actually know who wrote this) were fighting against the new trend of coffee houses in London, which had arrived some time in the...

I've redesigned the blog. This post just covers the technical whats and hows of it all. What's changed ? New Dark theme colours: Look around. Look at this dark purply-grey. Look at the same brand-orange, and the deliciously crisp white text. New colours! 100% More Portfolio: I completely revamped the...

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This heartening fact: Altruism, more specifically altruistic behaviour, is an action done (at cost) by an individual for the benefit of another individual. Why do humans, and other social animals, engage in altruistic behaviour? How does it makes sense on the evolutionary balance sheets? There is increasing evidence that altruism...

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Tiny Thoughts are little (500 word) essays. They're concise. Hypothesis: Frontend engineering cannot exist in isolation from backend technologies. What sparked this: Thinking about building the next generation of web software at Oxwash. All software is either... Used by a human for a human-scale (i.e. nebulous and larger) task like...

This etymology: The word "peculiar" has come to mean odd or unique, so obviously its Latin root word (‌peculium) means somebody's cattle. Cows were pretty valuable assets back in the day: you can eat them, milk them, use them as work animals, so they became a symbol of wealth. Later,...

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This fitness research: I've long been a fan of interval training to help improve my running and cycling speed. High intensity interval training (HIIT) is a method of training where you mix short bursts of intense activity (e.g. a 30 second sprint) between longer periods of low-intensity exercise (e.g. 90...

Awwwards have put out a collection of free (or free-adjacent) fonts. You can find them here....

These underwater drawings: Go back to 1860s and ask someone what coral reefs, or fish, or literally any marine life looked like. Go on. I bet they'd tell you they had no idea. How would they? Sure, we'd been sending people down there since the 1500s in these giant metal...

This is based off a sesh (think lightning talk, but... cooler?) I gave at Oxwash, where I am a frontend software engineer. I wanted to give an overview for how I take notes in pretty much every area of my life, including my job but also for holidays, notes from...

This week the UK Government has brought us Lockdown The Third, a threequel in the franchise after the straight-to-TV movie that was the November lockdown. Cases, deaths, and hospital admissions are at an all-time high in our country at the moment, with London in particular looking pretty scary. It might...

Resolutions are dumb. They're unsustainable and you can fail at them. Humans are just awful at long-term behaviour or thought-pattern change. Instead, I like themes: broad ideas that only try to guide you, not dictate. They're not a single thing, they're like a north star, or a prompt for conversation...

Happy New Year 🎊🥳🍾 It's been one hell of a ride, 2020, and I hope that I never know another year like you. This has been quite enough. We're at least six months from being slightly out of the woods, but we've made it through nine-to-twelve (depending on where you...

This week's post comes a little lighter, on account of it being Christmas and all. I didn't want to break a streak, but also I want to get back to eating far too much and doing far too little. So let's get on with it: This etymology: The word apocalypse...

2020 has been a terrible year in so, so many ways for so, so many people. At the very least, the Covid-19 pandemic has stolen a year from us all. I would say most of us have gone through a personal and collective trauma this year. I do not believe...

All of these species named after David Attenborough: The man's a living legend (he's also like 94 - he was a teenager in the 1930s which was before the second world war - this isn't the fact by the way, this is just some incredible side-facts). The collective scientific community...

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I took a four day week last week, so managed to spend this week with all the energy that only a 3-day weekend can give you. That said, I've found myself incredibly busy this week. This is the first evening (Thursday) where I've managed to find some time to myself...

It's time of year again: Spotify have released their Rewind - showing you what you listened to throughout this year. After the year (or decade, or complete non-year, whatever helps you) that 2020 has been, I think a lot of people have looked to music for a bit of refuge,...

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These Tattoos: In the late 1880s, a man called Sutherland Macdonald became the UK's first professioanl tattoo artist. Although he was already an artist, he started the tattoo craft after a trip to the South Pacific. Macdonald is the reason we have the word 'tattooist' (a portmanteau of tattoo and...

Tiny Thoughts are little (500 word) essays. They're concise. I make user interfaces, and I often participate in, or lead, the process of designing these interfaces. For a while I thought I wanted to transition fully into a design role. Ultimately I am drawn to the certainty and craft of...

"Isn't it getting dark early ?" - how I've started at least half of the conversations I've had this week. This thing that spreads like a disease: Look, I was a germaphobe before it was cool. I was very aware of how one thing can spread from person to person....

Figma recently introduced Variants - a way of extending and varying your components. Components in Figma, and in modern web development, are reusable and encapsulated elements of a design - with the classic examples of a Button or a Card. Variants add new flexibility, and utility, to components in Figma...

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Happy Friday 13th. I hope it's spooky and magical. This Roman Beverage: I'd imagine the Romans were pretty thirsty. The Mediterranean is warm, and you'd work up quite the thirst inventing a whole number system, apartments, a calendar, and like a million kinds of war machinery. Not that I'd know....

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WHAT. A. WEEK. It feels the entire western world has had their eyes on the US presidential election, and it's been exhausting. Not exhausting in the way that the last 12 months have been for the US, but exhausting in the way that nothing in 2020 has lead us to...

Sometimes you keep hearing words but you're not actually sure what they mean, but you're too afraid to ask and keep forgetting to Google it. For me, two of those phrases have been "JavaScript runtime" and "JavaScript engine". I've never studied Comp Sci at uni, and I've never practically needed...

This high fat diet: Whales, like dolphins but also humans, are mammals. This means they feed their young with milk. As you would expect, the blue whale has the largest mammary glands on Earth – each is about 1.5m long and weighs as much as a baby elephant. Blue whale...

Tiny Thoughts are little (500 word) essays. They're concise. I've spent the past three months consciously trying to write and read more. I want to improve my ability to refine and communicate thought, and doing it in public helps motivate me to produce work. One of the hardest problems I...

This thing about how we sleep: In Western Europe, about 35% of young adults sleep with a soft toy every night, and about 44% of people keep hold of their childhood soft toy. It can be especially helpful for people with low self-esteem, or higher anxiety to sleep with a...

I'm a few weeks into starting a new job as a frontend software engineer, and I've been moving around our (Angular) codebases to make a few smaller changes, and bump a number of our core dependencies through a couple of major (e.g. 1.0.0 -> 2.0.0) versions. This caused a few...

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This Tiny City: St. David's is a city with a population of about 1,000 people. In 1886 it was stripped of its status as a city, being described as "lonely, and the neighbouring district wild and unimproved". In 1994 Queen Elizabeth II requested it be restored as a city, and...

I've just had my first week at a new job (I'm now a frontend software engineer at Oxwash), which is cool. I find first weeks intense because I have to balance a) the immediacy of being introduced to everything and everyone in "real life", i.e. not an interview setting, for...

In honour of the announcement of (some of) the 2020 Nobel Prizes, this week's edition contains entirely things I learned when reading about the people and work announced so far. Note that this doesn't include anything about the Peace or Economics prizes, which had not been announced at the time...

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This week's Things I learned is a little shorter than usual because I've been moving house. I hate every part of moving house. Anyway, enough excuses, here are some of the things I learned this week: This thing about reading: I've been thinking about how much we read recently. I...

A few months ago a prominent figure in the tech and software space was uninvited from a conference\[^1]. In an (intentionally humorous) summary of this person, Melissa McEwan wrote a Tech Bullshit Explained about the person. I don't want to talk about any of allegations or (tellingly-immature) reactions to the...

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This unknown origin: No one is quite certain where the term "rule of thumb" came from. It has been mistakenly attributed to a British Judge's rule that a man can beat his wife if the stick so long as it is less wide than his thumb, however there's no evidence...

In late summer of 2020 I moved from freelance software engineer to a full-time position. I want to outline this process for literally anybody who's interested because I've found it useful when other people have done the same - like this post about interviewing at Google, this front-end, and this...

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These ways of thinking: When we hand over a new problem to our brain there's a lot of things we need to do to solve it. We need to understand the problem and the surrounding/causal concepts as well as the constraints on a solution. For example the challenge might be...

This missed opportunity to name something: Ping Pong is a weird name for a sport, right? Ping Pong is actually a trademarked name, but it's not uncommon to call a thing by a brand name: it's like Hoover vs. Vacuum Cleaner, or Kleenex vs. Tissue. The real-fun fact here is...

Let's start with a correct, but pretty dense, definition: JavaScript Promises are a first-class abstraction for handling asynchronous actions, like: Fetching data from a remote API. Reading or writing (i.e. opening or saving) a file to the filesystem (in a server-side environment, not in a browser). Retrieving a non-blurred-up version...

This world: The Word Kipple is a word invented by SciFi writer Phillip K. Dick, to mean the kind of rubbish/trash that accumulates if humans don't intervene. source This part of our brain: You know when you suddenly remember that you need to reply to that e-mail, drop off that...

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I have loved Apple solidly for eight years, since I was 20 and gifted a Mac Mini for Christmas. I wrote my Masters thesis on that thing in a ground floor bedroom of a student house overlooking suburbia at 3am on a Tuesday night. I finished my Ph.D. thesis on...

This medieval lingo: Have you ever wondered how to refer to the area where a good-old-fashioned joust took place? You know, jousts? Two men, two horses, two giant poles, and one film where Heath Ledger is irresponsibly handsome? Sorry, I got distracted there - did you know the area where...

Sometimes you hear something so often that you don't really hear it anymore. One of those things for me is words to the effect of "How does this JavaScript code even run?". I choose to interpret this generously as "How does JavaScript itself run", and not "how does this hot...

This useful thinking tool: good writing starts with observations, and moves to analysis. Making the transition is difficult. One way to spot a mental crutch is to see where you reach for words like "interestingly", "surprisingly", or "notably". These all hint at a significance or meaningfulness, but don't actually clarify...

This tidbit about a literary villa: Over three days in June of 1816 at a villa in Geneva, Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and John William Polidori started The Vampyre (which preceded the modern romantic image of vampires). The latter inspired Lord Byron (who was also...

Like anybody who makes interfaces for apps/websites, I spent a lot of time looking at Design Inspiration (read: UIs, real or imaginary, made by other people). This is a really good way to look at visual conventions that other people made, and have used in their UIs and UX. If...

📚tl;dr - I used Render to deploy a Rails app and database. It was very easy, very fast, and very modern. Would recommend to everyone. Way back before the pandemic I had the idea for hereabouts - an app that people can use to explore the city they're visiting, or...

I like building software, or parts of software, which are visual and interactive. I do not particularly enjoy the more abstract, very important, areas like technical optimisation, language design, or anything with the word "distributed" in it. I like building user interfaces (UIs); but also architecting and engineering the code...

Hi, I'm Thomas Wilson, I'm a web and mobile engineer building Hereabouts - an app that's like a tour guide if the tour guide was like Roman Mars after three beers. This is a devblog where I talk about my progress building that app. Also I'm very sorry, Roman, you're...

I am currently in the process of building herabouts - an app that's like a tour guide, only cooler. Most of my previous engineering work has been web-based (react and vue) because the internet is an accessible and very capable system for building modern applications. However hereabouts needed certain native...

UX design resists standardisation or templates. It can't be a one-size-fits-all approach, and the nature of the product, audience, and production team all mean that something different is needed each time. Whenever I get past the early stages of UX design (like understanding what a product does, and who it...

Hi, my name's Thomas Wilson but I often go by my just my surname. I'm 28 years old, currently based in London, England, and I design and build software for a living through my small independent studio tinyfox studio. At the beginning of 2020 I quit my job to do...

A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with someone about modern web design, and we spoke about web fonts and variable fonts. In my experience, people who work in software development have a couple of hills that they will die on, if so required. For this person -...

This season turned out to be surprisingly busy with culture. I started the month by talking at two tech events in London, meaning I arrived into the full body of the month having produced some very technical, thoughtful output. I needed some really well-considered and curated culture to put everything...

The elders tell us of a time where you would build websites by literally writing your .html files. If you wanted to add some styles, you'd write them in a .css file and then \<link rel="stylesheet"> the two together. So you'd write your entire site in semantic HTML, about whatever...

This piece turned out a little long than expected because I really want to clarify that this is not a "Why Bear is better than Notion" article. It is a "Why Bear suits my needs right now better than Notion" discussion. So there's a little more nuance in my explanation....

This post is published right at the tail-end of Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2016. It has been inspired by a lot of people's choices to share their experiences with EDs. I'm trying to do the same: just share my experiences, and how my personal relationship with food and mental health...

Last year I wrote a piece for Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2016. Twelve months of living later and things aren't the same as they were. To recap, twelve months ago I was several months out of an abrupt breakup, which saw me lose a big part of my support network....