Writing.

Nobody ever knew how it worked

Cyrus Lopez published an essay last week, ‘The Last People Who Know How It Works’, and it’s the best thing I’ve read about computing this year. It mourns an intimacy with machines that he thinks is...

American frontier models are a political dependency now

Claude Fable 5 was in public hands for about three days before Anthropic took it back. Nothing was wrong with the model. The block came from a US demand Anthropic couldn’t meet: keep non-US nationa...

A Mars rover, a careers fair, and a hundred future developers

This week I stood at a primary school careers fair, on what turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year so far, and tried to convince children between the ages of four and eleven that soft...

Data residency was the wrong question

The Dutch government today blocked Kyndryl’s acquisition of Solvinity, the IT company that operates DigiD. DigiD is the digital identity system roughly fourteen million Dutch citizens use to file t...

The military aircraft tracker I built for an audience of one

At about half past eleven one evening this week I noticed a US Navy E-6B Mercury orbiting over the North Sea. Not “noticed” in the way of someone who happened to look up — I was on the sofa with a ...

The harness is the product, not the model

Cloudflare’s Project Glasswing write-up landed today and the Hacker News thread is mostly arguing about whether the prose was written by Mythos or by Opus. It is a fair complaint and an irrelevant ...

If AI made Cloudflare more productive, the layoffs are the wrong move

Cloudflare laid off more than 1,100 people yesterday, around 20% of the company. The announcement, titled ‘Building for the Future’, explains the cuts by noting that internal AI use is up 600% in t...

A Loop Intelligence Hub guarantees the failure it claims to solve

Robert Glaser has a long post arguing that individual AI productivity gains do not become organisational gains, and that companies need a ‘Loop Intelligence Hub’ to capture which agentic workflows ...

The UK already answered who owns AI-generated code, and it answered it the other way

Sena Evren’s piece on who owns the code Claude Code writes was the most-discussed link on Hacker News this week, and it is a careful walk through human authorship, work-for-hire, GPL contamination,...

Claude Code's hook system just got weaponised

The Lightning PyPI compromise published on 30 April is being written up as another Shai-Hulud variant, which it is. Versions 2.6.2 and 2.6.3 of the lightning package shipped with a hidden _runtime ...

The Fogbank analogy is wrong, and the real risk is narrower

Denis Stetskov’s piece this week, ‘The West Forgot How to Build. Now It’s Forgetting Code’, does a superb job of opening with the Fogbank story and the EU’s failure to deliver a million artillery s...

Writing tools for the agent that wrote them

Most of what I have shipped this year has been built using Claude Code. That part is no longer interesting on its own — half the engineering timeline is talking about it. What is more interesting i...

Building real products alone on Cloudflare and Claude Code

Six weeks ago I started building something. A real commercial SaaS product, not a prototype — authentication, billing, scheduled background work, document ingestion, AI generation, distribution flo...

On Graham-Cumming, POPFile, and which side of the spam problem Cloudflare actually knows

A reader emailed after my Email Service post to flag something I had missed. John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare’s CTO until March 2025 and now a board member, has a long pre-Cloudflare history in spam...

MCP is the cheapest way to get AI value out of the systems the public sector already runs

A proof of concept I built for the College of Policing is included in the techUK ‘From Pilots to Practice’ report this month as the Justice and Policing case study. It was a short engagement agains...

The real Claude Code story is the one Anthropic didn't call a bug

Anthropic published a postmortem yesterday covering three separate changes that degraded Claude Code output between 4 March and 20 April. Two were deliberate product decisions. One was an actual bu...

Cloudflare Email Service is a deliverability bet dressed as an agents launch

Cloudflare pushed Email Sending into public beta last week as part of Agents Week, with an announcement so thickly frosted in agent language that you could miss the actual product underneath. Strip...

Claude Code's memory tool ecosystem is mostly redundant with its own defaults

The fastest-growing category of Claude Code add-ons solves a problem Anthropic has already mostly solved. Native CLAUDE.md, auto memory, plan mode, hooks, and skills cover roughly 80% of what third...

Claude Team Premium vs Max plans: usage limits, pricing, and which to choose

Anthropic does not publish exact token counts for any Claude subscription tier. This makes direct comparison between Team Premium seats and individual Max plans unnecessarily difficult, and most on...

I wrote a book about Cloudflare

I have been writing about Cloudflare’s Developer Platform on this blog for a while now. Posts about Workers, Containers, Analytics Engine, the platform as a whole. Each one started the same way: I ...

The real AI coding debate is about capability, not productivity

A recent blog post titled ‘I miss thinking hard’ has sparked extensive debate among engineers, revealing something engineering leaders should find uncomfortable: a growing divide between those who ...

UK Fuel Price API creates new data layer for mobility applications

The UK government’s Fuel Finder service, which launched on 2 February 2026, mandates that petrol stations report price changes within 30 minutes. For organisations building navigation, fleet manage...

OpenAI's Codex App Confirms Anthropic Sets the Pace in Coding Agents

OpenAI has released a macOS desktop application for its Codex coding agent, providing a dedicated interface for running multiple AI agents in parallel across software projects. The launch confirms ...

Microsoft's Claude Code expansion signals strategic bet on Anthropic, not just tooling preference

Microsoft is deploying Anthropic’s Claude Code across its largest engineering divisions, including the teams responsible for Windows, Microsoft 365, Teams, and Edge. More significant than the engin...

What Becomes Expensive When Code Becomes Cheap

The inversion of Linus Torvalds’ famous dictum has been circulating for months now. “Code is cheap. Show me the talk.” It’s a clever rhetorical move, suggesting that articulation and architectural ...

Rethinking State at the Edge with Cloudflare Durable Objects

Most discussions of Cloudflare’s Durable Objects focus on what they can do: manage WebSocket connections, implement rate limiters, coordinate real-time collaboration. These are valid applications, ...

Teaching Values to Machines

Something remarkable happened in the final days of November 2025. A researcher named Richard Weiss, while probing Claude 4.5 Opus for its system prompt, stumbled upon something unexpected. The mode...

Teaching the Machine to Ask Itself Better Questions

Watch a developer struggle with an AI coding assistant and you’ll see the same pattern. They write a prompt. The model misunderstands. They add more detail. The model makes different wrong assumpti...

TikTok's payment service struggled at 100,000 queries per second until engineers rewrote critical APIs in Rust

At exactly 100,000 queries per second, TikTok’s payment service stopped being an engineering problem and became an economic one. The APIs fetching user balances and transaction statistics consumed ...

The Deliberate Constraints of MCP Elicitation

AI systems need to interact with the world. They need to read files, query databases, call APIs, and access services that require credentials, configuration, and context. The Model Context Protocol...

Data Architecture at the Network Edge

Cloudflare’s Data Platform announcement deserves attention not for what it builds, but for what it reveals about the economics of distributed analytics. By co-locating data processing with their gl...

The Security Imperative of AI Agent Infrastructure

We’re witnessing the birth of a new computing paradigm. Large language models are shedding their role as sophisticated search engines to become autonomous agents capable of executing complex workfl...

Chrome's Fortress Architecture

Looking at this Chromium vulnerability report, lets examine one of the most sophisticated browser security exploits discovered in recent years. This post shows how seemingly abstract architectural ...

OpenAPI Specification for the UK Police Data API

The UK government provides an excellent open data resource through data.police.uk, offering free access to street-level crime statistics, police force information, and neighbourhood policing detail...

Understanding Claude Code Plan Mode and the Architecture of Intent

Claude Code’s new plan mode solves a problem most developers didn’t realise they had. We’ve grown accustomed to AI tools that immediately start generating code, but this reactive approach often pro...

The Cloudflare Trap: How Pay-Per-Crawl Misses the Mark

Cloudflare’s new pay-per-crawl system sounds reasonable on paper: AI companies pay content creators for the privilege of scraping their work. Finally, some economic justice for publishers getting s...

Cloudflare Containers Changes Everything for Serverless Computing

Cloudflare has launched Containers, and it changes how we think about building applications at the edge. This is the missing piece in Cloudflare’s developer platform—the layer that handles everythi...

When Digital Archaeology Meets Border Control

The US Embassy in Dublin just dropped a bombshell that should terrify anyone who values digital privacy. Future student visa applicants must now provide “all social media usernames or handles of ev...

Three Lenses for Understanding Software Complexity

Software complexity discussions often devolve into frustrating exchanges where participants talk past each other. The reason is simple: we lack a shared definition of what complexity actually means...

SQLite's Architectural Evolution and Performance Optimisation

SQLite is a useful case study in architectural philosophy and the tensions that arise when general-purpose systems encounter specialised workloads. Most of us encounter it daily—embedded in smartph...

Securing LLM Agents Against Prompt Injection Through Design Patterns

As LLM-powered agents become more sophisticated and gain access to sensitive tools and data, prompt injection has evolved from academic curiosity to genuine business risk. A recent research paper f...

When Giants Fall - The Anatomy of Google's June 2025 Outage

On 12 June 2025, Google Cloud Platform experienced what can only be described as a catastrophic failure that brought down not only their own services but cascaded across the internet, taking Cloudf...

Pika.page vs Bear Blog

Bear Blog wins on every metric I care about. Pika.page is the prettier interface for people who would rather not see Markdown.

Cloudflare Containers - Reimagining Global Compute at the Edge

The boundaries between containers, serverless functions, and edge computing are blurring. Cloudflare’s forthcoming Containers offering, set to launch in June 2025, isn’t just another product in the...

What is Cloudflare Developer Platform?

If you’ve heard about Cloudflare’s Developer Platform but aren’t quite sure what it offers, this guide breaks it down in plain terms.

Thoughts on the Fujifilm GFX100RF

In a world where camera manufacturers battle in technical one-upmanship, Fujifilm has made a curious move. The new GFX100RF presents something genuinely different: a fixed-lens medium format camera...

Exploring the Engineering Marvel of Modern Camera Lenses

I’ve just stumbled upon what might be the most comprehensive resource on camera lens technology I’ve ever seen, and I simply had to share it with fellow photography enthusiasts. The website is call...

The Nikon-RED Acquisition Signals a New Era in Professional Imaging

The announcement of Z-mount versions of RED’s V-RAPTOR [X] and KOMODO-X cameras marks the first tangible outcome of Nikon’s acquisition of RED. While the mount change itself intrigues technically, ...

TPL Dataflow in .NET

If you’ve ever needed to process data through multiple stages with different throughput rates, handle concurrency gracefully, or build a processing pipeline that doesn’t overwhelm its downstream sy...

Essential AeroPress Brewing Guide

Basic Recipe & Technique

What is Cloudflare Workers Analytics Engine?

Time-series databases are hardly new, but Cloudflare’s Workers Analytics Engine offers an intriguing twist on the traditional approach. After diving into its technical documentation and architectur...

Why Machines Find Easy Things Hard

Watch a child pluck a raisin from a bowl and you’re seeing a feat that would humble the world’s most sophisticated robots. Yet those same robots can solve mathematical equations that would leave mo...

Understanding Bitemporal Primary Keys

Temporal databases just got more interesting. With PostgreSQL 18’s upcoming support for bitemporal primary and foreign keys, we’re seeing a fundamental shift in how databases handle time-aware data...

Repository-to-Prompt Tools

A new category of tools has emerged for AI-assisted software development: repository-to-prompt converters. These utilities address the need to feed entire codebases into LLMs like GPT-4, Claude, an...

The Myth of AI-Driven Codeless Development

AWS CEO Matt Garman told an internal meeting that within two years most developers might stop coding altogether. This is what someone says when they confuse coding with typing.

The Unseen Crisis in Open Source: When Critical Infrastructure Relies on Unpaid Labour

Polyfill.io was acquired by a Chinese company and immediately began injecting malware into the 100,000+ websites that loaded it, JSTOR and the World Economic Forum among them. The original maintain...

The Slow Decline of Google Search

Google has long been the dominant search engine, but in recent years the quality of its search results has noticeably declined. What was once a source of highly relevant information has now become ...

New 60fps E-Paper Tablet Sparks Excitement and Scepticism

A startup called Daylight has unveiled a unique new Android tablet featuring a custom 10.5” e-paper-like display boasting a 60fps refresh rate. Whilst e-ink devices like the reMarkable and Kindle S...

Anthropic's Groundbreaking Research on Interpretable Features

In a new paper, researchers at Anthropic have made significant strides in understanding the inner workings of large language models like Claude 3 Sonnet. By applying a technique called sparse dicti...

The Hypocrisy of Exemption: Politicians and Police Free from Surveillance

In the ongoing debate over the EU’s Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, commonly known as Chat Control, a glaring double standard has emerged. According to the latest draft, politicians, police, and int...

Reddit's Bot Problem

Reddit, once known as the “front page of the internet,” is clearly facing a growing bot problem that threatens the very nature of the site as a place for authentic human discussion and content shar...

Hashing passwords on Cloudflare Workers

I’ve recently needed to hash passwords as part of authentication endpoints for an API I’m building using Cloudflare Workers. My complete code is below as I failed to find a single place with this a...

Cloudflare's Outage: A Lesson in Overconfidence and Complacency

The recent Cloudflare outage is a stark reminder that even the most robust and seemingly secure systems are not impervious to failure. The incident, lasting from November 2 at 11:44 UTC until Novem...

Navigating the Wild West of Web Components

Web components have gained a lot of attention as a way to encapsulate and reuse HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They deliver on a lot of that promise—but there are several real-world considerations deve...

How ChatGPT Designed My Personal Logo

Rethinking the Smartphone Release Cycle

Annual smartphone releases stopped making sense years ago. The hardware delta between an iPhone 14 and an iPhone 15 is rounding error. Most of the headline ‘new’ software features could ship to las...

Mozilla in the Browser Wars: A Diminishing Force

Firefox now exists primarily as Google’s antitrust shield. ‘Web standards’ in 2023 means whatever Chrome ships. When alternative browser engines arrive on iOS, the small remaining argument for Fire...

This post was (mostly) written by Notion AI

I recently ventured into the world of Notion AI, enabling the features on my workspace with an eager curiosity to see what it could do for my writing. Although I wasn’t sure what to expect when I f...

The Rings of Power has nothing on Detectorists

After enduring The Rings of Power recently and being unsurprisingly disappointed, I’ve discovered the BBC show Detectorists. This programme has been around since 2014 but I only discovered it recen...

More writing

I feel like I should write more.

Moron Musk

Watching Musk destroy anything he touches at the moment is excellent entertainment.

Innovative caret

Bike Outliner, a rich text editor for macOS (sadly only macOS 😔) has just received an update that includes a neat feature I’ve not seen before.

Purchase research rabbit holes

I’ve been contemplating getting some binoculars for use at air shows and much like when I was looking for a microscope for micrometeorite hunting or looking for a new mattress, I’ve really enjoyed ...

Keychron K2 V2 keyboard

Everyone keeps going on about how good Keychron keyboards are so I caved and got one. The keyboard I’ve been using for the last 6 years was still working fine but I’d begun to not appreciate having...

Notion API code blocks

The official Notion API finally supports code blocks with a recent update. I’ve updated NotionToJekyll to add this functionality. This post is just a test to see if code blocks with different langu...

iPhone 13 Pro

FaceID is amazingly good, particularly considering I was such a lover of TouchID on the iPhone 6S and really did not like the idea of FaceID when it first came out having only seen terrible impleme...

I've pre-ordered an iPhone 13 Pro

I hate iOS. And I also hate Android. For years I developed apps for both platforms (and Windows desktop too) and for this reason I’m an anti-fanboy. I’m all too aware of the terrible memory usage w...

Time to get planning for Hacktoberfest 2021

I’ve done the last 3 or 4 Hacktoberfests and really enjoyed the motivation to plough into a project during October.

Not-so-smarthome

Having recently moved house, we’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t need and won’t be reinstalling our smart lightbulbs and Amazon Echos, or any other smart devices for that matter.

Are C# GUIDs v4 UUIDs?

No. No they’re not. There’s too much misinformation floating around about this issue and it’s easy to prove they’re not. Although when using Guid.NewGuid() you seem to always get a v4 UUID, this do...

Added categories and tags to NotionToJekyll

I’ve just added post category and tag support to NotionToJekyll using two multi-select columns. This input type is perfect for these fields as they’re just string arrays. Now organising posts from ...

Publishing blog posts from Notion to Jekyll

I use Notion as my personal knowledgebase and normally write blog posts in temporary pages and then manually publish them to my Jekyll site using SiteLeaf. With the Notion API now operational I’d b...

Input select multiple in Blazor

There’s no built-in multiple select in Blazor but it’s pretty easy to get one working without any libraries.

The best software documentation I've ever seen

This blog uses Jekyll and I’ve no plans to change that - Jekyll is a great static site generator with plenty of features and a high level of maturity. Once in a while though I like to freshen thing...

Waiting for the official Notion API

Spring 2021 is still outlined as the release timeframe for the Notion API and I can’t wait. I’ve been using Notion since becoming a Lead Developer to try and improve my knowledge storage and it’s b...

HTMX & Razor

I’d just started drafting a post about combining HTMX with Razor pages to produce dynamic web applications and thought I’d better quickly check the internets to ensure it hadn’t been covered since ...

UK train dataset

I’ve published a dataset on GitHub that comprises of a single CSV file containing every locomotive in the UK. This includes historic and private locomotives, London Underground and other light rail...

Product idea: verifiable digital document sharing

Some employers, utility companies, banks or government departments still require you to be in possession of physical documents - it’s now 2021 and this is stupid.

No more .Net Standard 🎉

Whilst reading about the plan for Entity Framework Core 6.0 I noticed a remark about .Net Standard that I’d not clocked last year.

Easiest way to remove Windows 10 bullshit

I like Windows 10. As a developer using .Net and Azure I use Windows all the time and generally think it’s pretty great. However out of the box it does contain some annoying default settings, featu...

How to set blob content type when uploading to Azure Blob storage using Azure.Storage.Blobs

I recently wanted to upload something to an Azure Storage Blob Container and specify the content type without having to make another request, sadly there’s currently no documentation that I could f...

Excitement for the future of real-time graphics

A couple of days ago Epic released a video showing a demo for Unreal Engine 5. If you’re reading this then you’ve likely already seen that video, but I wanted to put into words my feelings about su...

What to talk about on family conference calls

With the ongoing pandemic and ‘lockdown’ facing a decent chunk of the planet, we’ve had to resort to video calls with our families using FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Zoom. This is all ...

How does Amazon DynamoDB work?

I’ve recently been looking into how exactly nosql document databases work. Not just existing solution APIs like Amazon DynamoDB and Azure CosmosDB, I mean how they work inside, with a view to creat...

How to run a timer triggered Azure Function instantly when developing

You can set a timer triggered Azure Function to run on startup when built for development like this:

How to deploy server-side Blazor to an Azure App Service

Sadly Microsoft’s documentation on this is non-existent at the moment and there are a couple of tricky parts that caught me out the first time I tried so I thought I’d provide instructions here for...

Winning Experian's Hack24 2018 challenge

For the third year in a row I attended Tech Nottingham’s Hack24; a 24 hour hackathon hosted in the heart of Nottingham and sponsored by some of the most prominent technology businesses in the area ...

C# nested property accessor

I recently had the need to access a property in another property in C#. Accessing a property value is trivial using PropertyInfo but it’s only capable of accessing properties on the current object ...

No JavaScript here

Earlier today I turned Cloudflare’s automatic email obfuscation off on this site. Why you might ask? Well because it was the only JavaScript on this site and I liked the idea of having absolutely n...

Marvin Visions

Jekyll makes it trivial to edit a site’s look and feel, just modify your sass files and push to Github. I keep playing around with colours, paddings and fonts - there’s always something to tweak.

Ubuntu on Windows

At home I use two computers: a 13 inch MacBook Pro for less intensive tasks and a Dell Precision T1700 with a 4K monitor when I want to stretch the software engineer bit of my brain. Jekyll is only...

Migrating to Jekyll

Having spent a lot of time recently (even more than normal) working with Git I decided to once again migrate my site to another content management system. I do this every few years, mainly because ...

Teaching at University

Whilst studying for my integrated master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Lincoln, I’m also demonstrating on a number of modules to enhance my own skills as well as gain some valua...

Android (and some not Android) device metrics

Google seems to be in the habit of making helpful little websites packed with info for developers. An apparently new addition to their line-up is the Device metrics page. It includes a list of comm...

Are there any benefits to making APIs copyrightable?

The White House has told the Supreme Court that APIs can be copyrighted (arstechnica.com). This is generally being perceived as terrible news, the design of an API is typically very standard affair...

Moving to a Mac

First of all, I feel it’s important to make clear that I’m typically a ‘Windows person’, that is to say, I’ve always used Windows as my primary OS. Of course I’m perfectly comfortable working with ...

100 Days of Fonts

I thoroughly enjoy looking at implementations of font combinations; the use of space, colour and content are all interesting considerations when choosing which font to use. Browsing fonts on Google...

Creating a Koken photography site

I never need much of an excuse to try a new CMS, subsequently I’ve created a new website for myself to showcase my photographic efforts using Koken. Recently treating myself to a new camera (a Cano...

Joining Ello

Ello.co is a new social network that’s caused a bit of a stir online due to its anti-Facebook attitude, the manifesto makes this fact pretty clear…

Beautifully visualised algorithms

Have a look at these delightfully colourful representations of a few common data structures and algorithms. Sometimes grasping fundamental concepts can be achieved faster using well designed visual...

Minimal form interface

How can web forms be reformed into a 21st century tool for data input? Codrops have published an interesting take on the traditional form that improves usability at the expense of universal support.

An eloquent explanation of Heartbleed

The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/...

Introducing the 'Anyone But Richard M Stallman' License

Having attended Dr Richard Stallman’s interesting talk at Lincoln University yesterday, I thought I’d have a look on Twitter at reactions to his militant views. One tweet sent me to the best softwa...

A place to be inspired: Awwwards

Finding a source of inspiration for a new project can be tough, I think so at least. So when I stumbled upon Awwwards my mind was blown. This site hands out awards to the very best websites as chos...

Using Tor for web development

Project Tor enables anyone to browse the internet anonymously as if from another side of the planet. This is useful to those wanting to engage in shady activities, it’s also very convenient for web...

Moot 1.5 is here and finally brings paid upgrades

As you will be aware by now, I’ve been following the beta journey of Moot, a new and exciting forum system designed to eradicate dated phpBB forums from the internet. The system has just reached a ...