Insights on software development, AI, and building better businesses
Australian graduate programmers are competing against 84 applicants per advertised vacancy. That number is real, and almost none of it is AI. The country doubled the number of people trying to enter tech, then the 2022 hiring boom ended.
A weekend spent pointing AI at Australia's most famous unsolved cipher. My conclusion is that it was never a cipher. It is the last page of a poem Carl Webb wrote about his own death.
In 2011 an app told you the calories in a photo of your dinner and reviewers called it jaw-dropping. It took a couple of minutes to answer because a human being was looking at your lunch.
AI is wrong in exactly the same tone it uses when it's right. That's survivable if you have twenty years of scar tissue. It's a much bigger problem if you're six months in.
I vibe coded a personal project as an experiment. It looked finished and the tests were green, right up until I stepped an inch outside the spec. Everything that saved me was experience, not tooling.
I typed in every line of my first programming book and nothing worked. I hunted for typos for weeks. It took me until a few years ago, when I found a PDF of the book, to work out what had actually gone wrong.
In 2001 an industry expert told my school that programmers were dime a dozen and the safe career was infrastructure, because you can't move infrastructure off site. Twenty-something years later, infrastructure is the only thing that left.
Businesses don't need the smartest model available for every task. Once good enough becomes cheap enough, the interesting question stops being which AI provider to use and becomes which parts of your AI infrastructure you should actually own.
We announced a server migration, aborted it halfway through, and changed absolutely nothing. The next morning the whole office reported chaos. A lesson in expectation, perception, and why we stopped telling people about maintenance.
AI can write a working feature in minutes. The problem starts when nobody on the team can explain what it actually does, or why.
A developer left the company and we inherited their projects. Every codebase was a new adventure. SQL injection in the login page was just the warm-up act.
How I built a distributed file sync system using rsync, MySQL replication, and PHP across offices in 5 countries, years before cloud storage was a thing.
In high school I failed an IT assignment for correctly defining a GUI and a CPU. The lesson wasn't that my teacher was wrong. It was that being the person at the front of the room and being the person with the right answer are two completely unrelated things.
My new Bambu Lab P2S kept throwing filament tension errors. Four filament brands later, I found the real cause: plastic manufacturing debris jammed in the extruder sensor.
A user couldn't understand why they could change their password on their computer but not their phone. The answer was both completely logical and a small UX failure all at once.
Most AI companies lead with the technology. That's the wrong direction. Businesses don't want AI, they want their problems solved.
A 2am call about a total network outage at a warehouse led to a server room with everything on the floor and a wall moved half a metre. Security footage later revealed the culprit: a forklift driver who apparently didn't even notice.
In 1996 I told a teacher I wanted to enter a programming competition and she laughed and asked why I'd ever think I could. She was correct about the outcome and completely wrong about the question, and it took me twenty years to work out the difference.
The Swann NVR-7400 has decent hardware let down by buggy software. It turns out the same hardware is sold as the Reolink RLN8-410, and their firmware actually works.
The story of how typing four letters on a Linux login screen nearly got me reported to HR. A lesson in technical literacy, communication gaps, and the chaos of supporting duct-tape infrastructure.
The story of a recurring network outage that turned out to be caused by someone who valued cold drinks more than site-wide communications. A lesson in priorities, signage, and the chaos of early IT support.
My Yamaha RX-V675 receiver started cutting out on cold mornings. No sound on startup, then pops and crackles for twenty minutes before it would work. Turned out to be a dry solder joint, fixed with a hairdryer, a bag of ice, and a Ryobi heat gun.
Build an iOS Shortcut to automatically remove UTM parameters and other tracking garbage from URLs. Share clean links without the surveillance baggage.
A high school teacher saw a student saving work to a floppy disk and banned him from the computers for trying to 'download the internet.' To a 1.44MB floppy disk. Over Dual ISDN.