Biographies of every US president as audiobooks
I enjoy reading history, especially in the form of historical biographies. Over the years I've picked up books about several of the founding fathers of the USA, plus major historical figures like FDR,...
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Databases: how they work, and a brief history
My twitter-friend Simon had a simple question that contained much complexity: how do databases work? Ok, so databases really confuse me, like how do databases even work?— Simon Legg (@simonleggsays)...
View ArticleWhat is good code?
I think it's code that does what you need it to do and is ready when you need it. Those are the two iron requirements. If it doesn't do the job or isn't ready when I need it, it's not good code....
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You Will Never Be A Full Stack Developer
or, Career Advice For The Working Web Dev I have been thinking a lot about the thing we call "the stack", one of many vague concepts web developers use when describing themselves. People call...
View ArticleTwenty years of blogging
On this day in 2001, an astonishing 20 years ago, I set up my blog. My first post was not particularly enthralling. It wasn't my first website; that was in 1995 and is lost to the mists of time. It...
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What I've learned about data recently
I've been a web developer for 25 years now. In the last 10 years, at two different companies, my focus has increasingly shifted to working with what is somewhat eye-rollingly referred to as "big data"...
View ArticleCrypto: the good, the bad and the ugly
It has been very frustrating watching the rise of cryptocurrency (which, forgive me cryptographers, I will be calling "crypto" from here on) because a whole bunch of smart people in tech seem to be...
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The case for frameworks
Today I read Alex Russell's post The Market for Lemons and I found myself compelled to write a rebuttal. I am a big fan of Alex's work in general but not of this post in particular, which is very long,...
View ArticleThere's no such thing as the fundamentals of web development
Nine months ago I gave a talk about how there is no such thing as the fundamentals of web development. It's a thing I have been saying for years but keep getting pushback on, and when that happens it's...
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On AI, ML, LLMs and the future of software
I recently left my job at Netlify and have been looking at what's next. At Netlify I became very interested in the power of ML, AI and LLMs in particular, and that's the area I've been looking in. But...
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