Notes, mostly.

Why I will happily take worse code in return for better comms

A small pattern for showing that an LLM opened your guidance files before it called the tool — and for measuring which ones it consulted.

A personal assistant that dreams, built from plain old markdown.

A little tool that strips comments and resolves imports in markdown prompt files

Why mise triggers empty macOS notifications on every cd in iTerm2, traced to its terminal_progress OSC escape sequences, with a one-line config fix to disable them.

Robot Battle in the browser, with a new programming language...

Vanilla Claude and custom plugins...

Claude variants become best friends

What can we learn from Anthropic’s own engineers prompt and structure agentic workflows?

Going full intravenous AI in open-source

I finished work at Natcap on 3rd July — more on that here. With a summer of free time ahead of me, it’s time to make some trouble…

The traditional usage of the 80/20 rule needs a rethink, from oversimplification to powerful learning tool.

Notes on Steve Morlidge's Little Book of Beyond Budgeting, covering why annual budgeting fails, Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, and how to replace it with continuous targets, forecasts and devolved teams.

Using probabilistic techniques for exploring data and modelling outcomes

A short annotated list of books, articles and tweets that shaped my thinking on product management, including Shape Up, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy and Humble Inquiry.

I wrote a guide to help my team's Project Leads. It might be useful for you too.

What have we learned in a year of GraphQL at Twitter?

Working notes on migrating Twitter's Bash CLI tools to Rust, listing the existing Bash capabilities to replace, useful crates, and the trade-offs against using Python.

Why a tech lead creates more value by pairing, reviewing and mapping out the team's possible next steps than by diving in to write the code themselves.

Introducing if-expression and try-expression, two small JavaScript libraries that turn if and try-catch-finally statements into expressions that always return a value.

How the TweetDeck team evolved Flight.js since 2014, borrowing React and Redux ideas for state, child components, RxJS data flow and connected components, and why they stuck with Flight over a rewrite.

Tracing a path from class-based mutable state through Python's self to pure functions, showing how an ordinary instance method becomes a Redux-style reducer that is reusable and testable.

Roles and responsibilities of a Tech Lead

Building TweetDeck's open-source Twitter search query parser in JavaScript, using a PEG grammar and Canopy to convert queries to an AST and back, with notes on stringification and reversible-parsing tests.

A curated list of favourite talks and articles on architecture, HTML/CSS, tools, distributed systems and professional practice, featuring Rich Hickey, David Nolen and others.

A short wishlist for a frontend toolchain with reliable type inference, clean interop, distributable types and debuggable sourcemaps, lamenting that no current option delivers it.

A short personal note on drawing motivation in tough coding sessions by comparing the struggle to hard physical exercise, wondering if others think the same way.

An annotated reading list of books, papers, talks and blogs on distributed systems, from Kleppmann and Aphyr to Lamport's clocks paper.

Argues that request cancellation does not belong in the Promise spec, drawing on the fetch and es-discuss debates to show why fetch needs its own primitives instead.

Lessons from a six-month TweetDeck technical-debt project on identifying debt, deciding what to pay off, weighing refactor versus rewrite, and the people side of touching legacy code.

Why prototyping problems in Haskell first works as type-checked pseudo-code, using its type system as a forcing function to clarify thinking before writing real code.

A defence of keeping presentation logic alongside templates, as React does, arguing that view logic and markup are one concern and that splitting them lowers cohesion.

How to write Elm native modules in plain JavaScript by hooking into the compiler's Elm.Native namespace, with a clear warning that it's an unsupported hack.

A from-first-principles build of core.async-style channels and composable transducers in JavaScript, then wiring them together to filter and map DOM events.

Patterns from running nearly 200 Twitter Flight components in TweetDeck, covering component types, mixins, nested teardown, and event namespacing conventions.

A worked walkthrough of git's interactive rebase, using edit, squash and commit splitting to tidy a messy commit history before pushing.

A reminder that build it and they will come is false: find customers and understand their problem first, and reach for technology only once you can deliver value.

A first evening coaching at codebar, the London meetup running free programming sessions for women and others under-represented in tech, and why its strong turnout matters.

Why functions taking many positional arguments are a refactoring smell, and how an options object (and Promises) makes calls clearer and order-independent.

Introduces casper, a small library of helpers and handlers for building JSONP APIs in Express, with database callbacks and body checks, filters and whitelists.

Introduces distra, a Node CLI tool that serves static files and reverse-proxies local servers under friendly hostnames, managing your hosts file automatically.

Practical ways to keep API keys and config out of an open-source repo, comparing gitignored files, private forks, environment variables and a fallback chain that supports all of them.

A short argument that responsive design should mean more than screen size: the web could adapt to a user's location, mood, behaviour and context, not just their device.

A handful of everyday JavaScript snippets for logging arguments, binding this in setTimeout, filtering and mapping arrays, and setting default function arguments.

A personal recap of 2012: starting and leaving a CS degree, building frittr, working at Buffer and on App.net apps, and landing a dream job at Left Logic.

A technique of sketching throwaway code snippets to design intuitive, consistent module interfaces, treating developer experience much like a designer treats user experience.

What currying (partial application) is and why it's useful, building a curry function from scratch and showing how ES5's bind handles both this-binding and argument fixing.

Exploring the Shadow DOM and the emerging web component model, with a hands-on experiment turning a story list into an encapsulated widget in Chrome Canary.

Drawing on human evolution and ant colonies to argue that contributing to open source has outsized impact, backed by data showing roughly 1.3% of users contribute to major projects.

A personal git workflow based on GitHub Flow: a deployable master, frequent cheap branches, pull-request reviews, and a feature/fix/task/try naming convention.

How JavaScript's call and apply work and differ, with practical uses like converting arguments to an array and a worked pub/sub example.

A first look at TypeScript, covering installation and how object types (interfaces) and function types let you catch errors before running your JavaScript.

A proof-of-concept walkthrough of how a browser extension could silently keylog passwords and intercept form data, as a warning about trusting what you install.

After mentoring kids at Young Rewired State, a critique of results-led schooling as a conveyor belt and a case for self-directed, internet-enabled learning.

A trick for hosting client-side JavaScript apps on Amazon S3 by pointing the index and 404 pages at the same file, faking a directory structure from the request URI.

Quick techniques for safer JavaScript: avoiding global variables, wrapping code in self-executing functions, the leading-semicolon guard, and protecting against a redefined undefined.

An argument that developers should take pride in well-documented, tested, readable code rather than valuing code that merely works, especially in open source.

A walkthrough of a personal site redesign, using Gridset for a compound grid alongside Jekyll, LESS and in-browser design with JS Bin.

A short personal note on how turning off Growl desktop notifications removed constant interruptions and restored focus.

A reflection on what makes designing for the web distinct: conveying structured information and, uniquely, designing the hyperlinked pathways between pieces of it.

Building a circular countdown spinner in pure CSS using the triangle border trick, radial-gradient masks and Webkit keyframe animations, including a layered mask-on-mask hack.

A personal reflection, prompted by an Extra Credits episode, on breaking an addiction to consuming online content in order to become a creator rather than a consumer.

A walk through a responsive design workflow, from six-up sketching and typography with Modular Scale and Typecast to fluid layouts and breakpoints where the design actually breaks.

A short opinion piece asking why startups chase social and sharing instead of harder problems, floating ideas in publishing, education and printers.