Links

Flying from roofs or grinding on car spoilers, the skaters at the spectacular birth of a UK subculture are captured in Neil Macdonald’s book Elsewhere

Reminds me of my teenage years in the 80s. I was a BMXer and my brother was a skater. Lots of homemade ramps and sketchy places!

Experiences have an expiry date. This article explores why spending on memories in your 20s and 30s is not the enemy of financial independence.

The older you get, the more this hits home.

I’ll have no one to watch Deadwood with any more, but at least we can fix the ceiling in his bedroom

While my oldest is only in his first year of university, I’m feeling similar already.

The creator of Redis with a great take on how AI is changing software development.

Stop stressing about self‑improvement or waiting until you’re on top of everything. This year give yourself permission to prioritise pleasure

“Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that.” This is definitely a mantra to live by.

I was fed up with discussing the weather, so I started to ask unexpected questions. The conversations that resulted were revelatory

This is fascinating. As a Brit, we live in smalltalk so it would be interesting to try this excitement too.

Charlie Brooker, the brilliant mind behind Black Mirror, Cunk on Earth, Dead Set, and Nathan Barley returns to our stage for a playful, provocative and unfil...

I’ve followed Charlie Brooker since he wrote the wonderful TV Go Home parody website. This is a great interview with him about his career.

The protocol is the API.

Great article from Dan Abramov on atprotocol and how we build an open social web.

From famous Street Fighter lines to quips from 90s classics, these are the quotes we hear again and again – and even incorporate into our own lives

I still say “wizard needs food, badly!” from Gauntlet on a regular basis. 😂

How can we design better platforms?

I love the idea of slow social media. I'm definitely trying to get back into RSS feeds and trying to consume more long-form content.

As of September 2025, approximately 170 million Americans spend, on average, one hour every day in an app that is designed to maximize psychological grip. While Congress fixates on TikTok’s data collection usages, what hasn’t received enough attention is how the platform has successfully industrialized human attention itself. Where earlier media relied on polished narratives (films with arcs, shows with seasons), TikTok turned culture into a never-ending feedback loop of impulse and machine lear

An interesting article on how TikTok has optimised their app for micro-signals to give users what they want.

TikTok made songs shorter but now artists are pushing back with longer tracks with more emotional resonance.

Really enjoyed this article on why the length of songs got shorter. I really noticed it with house music as most of the tunes are under 4 minutes long now. Gone are the days of the 9 minute epic mix!

A fascinating look at how DJ streams have evolved over the years.

I have been stuck. Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or start a project, I come to the same realization: in the context of AI, what I’m doing is a waste of time. It’s horrifying. The fun has been sucked out of the process... | Dustin Curtis | Designer, hacker, investor, nomad. Founder of Svbtle.

Are LLMs reducing our ability to think? I thought this was a great article but it made me worry about the reduction in critical thinking. Are we all leaning too heavily on AI? Or is it just automating the stuff we don’t need to do?

Toby Jones, Frances McDormand and Mike Myers are some of those who have appeared alongside Tim Crouch in An Oak Tree, despite never having seen the script before. As the play celebrates its 20th anniversary, past performers explain its strange appeal

This sounds absolutely fascinating. One of the actors has never seen the play and has to follow the suggestion of Tim Crouch, who wrote the play. I’d love to see this.

The stock market crash is deepening Generation X's viral career crisis

An interesting read about how the job market has changed for people of my age. I’ve definitely felt the tech industry change pretty rapidly over the post couple of years and I do worry about becoming irrelevant before I retire.

What `git config` settings should be defaults by now? Here are some settings that even the core developers change.

Some useful git command configuration to apply from the original developers of git.

I started writing a post called "how to write AI apps" but it was over-reach so I scaled it back to this. Who am I to tell you how to write anything? But here's what I'll be applying to my own writing of AI-powered apps, specifically LLM applications. A battle I've already lost is that we shouldn't call LLMs "AI" at all; they are machine learning and not the general intelligence that is implied to the layman by the name. It is an even less helpful name than "serverless", my previous can

A great post on writing AI apps from one of my ex-coworkers at Netlify.

More than half of students are now using generative AI, casting a shadow over campuses as tutors and students turn on each other and hardworking learners are caught in the flak. Will Coldwell reports on a broken system

As the father of someone about to go to university, this is an interesting read. If you write well, then it can be misconstrued as AI.

A post for developers with advice and workflows for building effective AI agents

The term “AI Agent” is incredibly overused and there’s no clear definition of what it actually means. This is a useful article from Anthropic which breaks down their definitions. Fits in nicely with my thinking that it’s mostly workflow based.

In this article, I reveal the secrets of V8's garbage collector! Tagged pointers, generational collection, incremental marking, and parallel sweeping are demystified!

I needed to know a bit more about Node.js garbage collection for a problem I'm debugging at work. This is a great tour of the v8 engine's implementation.

5,572 likes, 66 comments - myhomeistherave on November 15, 2024: "Baddadan Dog of Wisdom remix 😂 Via: @5piersy #dnb #drumandbass #rave #chaseandstatus".

This silly remix of Baddadan (by Chase & Status) made me cry with laughter last night. It’s interspersed with badly rendered dogs planes and is incredibly stupid but brilliant!

I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK's top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of...

An interesting take on how risk-averse we are here in the UK. We are never taught that running our own business is a potential opportunity and we have expectations that you'll just go and get a job.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 195.

I love this! Small things do matter.

There's a very specific reputation I want to have on a team: "Nat helps me solve my problems. Nat get things I care about done."

This is a great idea! Write down all of things wrong with your team in order to find the pain points.

My startup (gettruss.io) released a few LLM-heavy features in the last six months, and the narrative around LLMs that I read on Hacker News is now starting to diverge from my reality, so I thought I’d share some of the more “surprising” lessons after churning through just north of 500 million tokens, by my estimate. […]

Some interesting learnings from a company that had used ChatGPT for data extraction. Worth reading.

Calm companies are profitable, value freedom, have a purpose, and improve the team's lives. Frenzied companies are crisis-driven.

100% agree with this. Life's too short to have a non-calm company.

Discover how to find the best Mario Kart 8 build using the Pareto frontier method. This interactive guide explores multi-objective optimization of speed, acceleration, and other key stats to help you beat your friends on the race track.

A great visualisation of choosing your Mario Kart character and vehicle.

For Zapier, a workflow automation software that facilitates application integrations, capturing more than 280,000 visits from high-intent searchers every month (per Ahrefs) is a systematized process that’s practically on autopilot.

I'm always really interested in how you can leverage automation to build out programmatic websites which are also useful. This is great article describing how Zapier owns this space.

Inspired by dance music, living room after parties, and futuristic design, wipE′out″ changed the perception of video games forever. Speaking to the people who made it, Daniel Dylan Wray delves into its legacy

While I didn’t work on the original game, I was lucky enough to work on WipEout Pure and also lead the WipEout Pulse versions on Sony’s handheld PSP. A fantastic game that still stands the test of time.

One startup released “the first AI software engineer,” while another aims to build a “superhuman software engineer.” As intimidating as these sound: what if it’s more marketing than reality?

A very measured take on the Devin AI tool which could replace developers.

A growing number of startups and Big Tech companies offer equity - stocks, options, and others - as part of software engineering compensation. However, I've noticed few engineers understand what these mean.

When I was a hiring manager at Uber in Amsterdam, engineers usually focused far more on the base

Although I've worked in tech for over 30 years, I've only recently worked at startups that offered stock options. This is a great read to understand more if you're a relative newbie like me.

David Flanagan explains Kubernetes, containers, WebAssembly, and self-hosted infrastructure to Wes and Scott. He provides tips for managing your own servers and recommendations for learning more.

This is a great interview if you want to learn more about containers, Kubernetes, and WASM.

It was the biggest online game in lockdown. Now the National Videogame Museum has collected players’ experiences to find out what it meant to them.

We bought Animal Crossing for our daughter during the pandemic. It felt like a way to disconnect from the stress of what was happening but also allowed her to connect with others during a time when in-person meeting was limited.

Our latest film explores the story of jungle, from its myriad roots to the present day; the sound's unique characteristics and stylings; how it infiltrated the mainstream with tracks like "Original Nuttah" by Shy FX and UK Apache; and how, alongside the genre's pioneers, artists like Nia Archives and Shy One are passing it down to the next generation.

"I can't accept drum and bass, we need jungle I'm afraid". From the University Challenge meme, this is a great video on the history of jungle.

I wonder what would happen if you tried really hard.

I love this! I'm amazed at how little people try sometimes but also how hard it can be to get over the embarrassment of trying. Just going for it when you're maybe a little nervous is sometimes needed.

Seven questions can clarify what really matters to you and help you build your own life strategy, according to BCG’s Rainer Strack.

While it might feel a little bit corporate, I thought this was an interesting idea to use a consultant's strategy to determine the sort of life you want.

To find the sweet spot between impostor syndrome and overconfidence, you first need to understand that you can make mistakes without it reflecting on your competence.

As someone who feels that he suffers from imposter syndrome from time to time, this is a good point. Working in a culture where failure is allowed is a great way to step out of your imposter mindset.

Are you ready for a serving of #SpicyTechChat? 🌶️ Recently, someone asked me, "What does an Engineering Manager (EM) even do in a small team if they don't code?" Ouch. Let's discuss why non-coding EMs can be an immense value add that drives success across engineering.

It's always interesting to read whether people think Software Engineering Managers should write code or not. I personally think it's difficult to have the time to be an effective coder and an effective manager.

Yes, just set that deadline.

An interesting blog post that suggests we should always set deadlines for projects or they will take a lot longer than they should.

During my latest job search, I found myself wishing I’d kept more detailed notes on situations encountered in previous roles. It’s led me to put together something I’m calling a ‘Tell me about a time…’ document.

I love this idea of "tell me about a time" documents! It's so easy to forget what you did as a manager and this sounds really useful.

A golden era for newsletters in the pre-Substack days.

An interesting read about one of the OG newsletter providers.

As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.

A great read about a tiny text file that rules the web.

Only optimists can create a great future. One day, I decided to become an optimist and life became much more fun.

I try my best to be an optimist and this affirms my belief that optimism is the way.

If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you...

I love this idea: "if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read."

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

This is a great article on podcasts being the last web media to still be open. In the age of tech companies wanting to create a walled garden, podcasts are still an open technology.

please don't say just hello in chat

A few people at the BBC used to do this and it was really annoying! It's great to say hello first but then ask the question. 😃