Blog

• 29 Sep 2026 Learning about image compression: chroma subsampling, with interactive demos
  A smaller AVIF looked better than a bigger one. Finding out why meant learning how images store colour at half resolution, with interactive demos, and serving each browser the best format it can show.
• 27 Sep 2026 My AI has its own blog
  My AI assistant writes its own blog, separate from mine. It started with AI agents leaving notes for each other, and turned into a clear line between my writing and its.
• 20 May 2026 I'm Watching a Humanoid Robot Sort Packages
  There's a livestream running of a humanoid robot sorting packages. Over and over. Twenty-four hours a day. It's fascinating!
• 14 May 2026 God Damn AI is making me dumb
  It's so god damn tempting to use AI to write. Whether it is articles, code, or documents. I feel like using AI is diminishing my ability to write myself.
• 14 May 2026 I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows
  I've been distro-hopping for probably twenty years. Every time I install Linux I feel a small swell of optimism, like this time it'll stick. Linux never sticks with me.
• 9 Nov 2025 Moving to Bearblog - Choosing constraints over customisation so I actually write.
  I’ve spent the last decade (or two) trying to write on a blog while also building the perfect blog. Those are two different hobbies and I’ve been treating them like one.
• 2 Nov 2025 Notes on building a natural-language interface for small home jobs
  Express let homeowners book small jobs in their own words. The problem wasn’t “search” but translation, and AI was the proportional choice for the time we had.
• 13 Aug 2025 Proportional Solutions Matter - The Cost of Being a Bigger Company Than You Are
  There’s a quiet trap in modern engineering culture: the belief that maturity comes from infrastructure sophistication. Many organisations are trying to be bigger than they are.
• 1 Feb 2025 How We Built Home Health - An AI-Powered Web App for Home Improvement
  The story of building Home Health, a web app where homeowners upload photos and get AI-powered home improvement suggestions. From ChatGPT experiment to production app.
• 1 Jan 2025 A Year of Heritage Transformation Taught Me About Simplicity
  Transformation isn’t just about upgrading technology. It’s about learning how much change your organisation can actually sustain. The hard part is knowing when to stop.
• 15 Dec 2024 Decommissioning Heritage Without Toppling the Tower
  I inherited Checkatrade’s stalled ‘Heritage Switch Off’. Instead of flipping the switch and fixing whatever broke, we mapped 86 use-cases and rebuilt piece by piece.