Efficient != robust

Yet another entry to the long list called "what software engineering can learn from other fields", this time about why automating everything is solving one set of problems while simultaneously creating whole new ones.

11 September 2026 Continue reading

The archive

2026-08-22 Chasing chokepoints
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