I love making computers do new things.
Birmingham, UK
Joined April 2015
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Make Coding Fun Again!
I post short videos; occasionally irrelevant, but hopefully innovative and informative.
See them here and on my 🎥 YouTube channel:
youtube.com/@NightPigeonWrat…
Before inventing a Domain Specific Language, pop the kettle on and consider Python.
It's easy to read already, the tooling is there already, and your users know it already.
🤖 Made with AI
AI models were asked what they really think of humanity.
Their verdict? We're a bunch of conformist sheep.
The irony? They all agreed. 🐑
I made a video about AI and who gets to control it.
youtube.com/watch?v=4WEInXe1… – at Hollywood, England
Coding agents make a wonderful skeleton PR, saving a ton of typing, googling and cut and pasting, but I change something, sometimes many things, in pretty much every commit. People who just treat it like a compiler and machine code, do they eventually end up with what they want?
I handwrote a patch to fix a GTK bug last night, tested it with my mark one eyeballs on Linux and Mac. It was merged today. Hooray.
Reminds me of Gaius Baltar's line in BSG (2009):
"Listen, Admiral, I am offering you the last human solution you will ever be presented with."
Still very pre-release, but this weekend I provided safety rails. Before if you had a parent card with child cards, I trusted the user to move children first not orphan them. Now 0.2.5 will tidy up in a hopefully sensible manner.
holder.team/
github.com/HolderTeam/holder…
🤖 Made with AI
LLMs make senior engineers more productive, they are doing more engineering and less typing.
I don't think a complete non-coder can make quality apps end to end unless they get the LLM to explain every line, and the user is willing to backfill and learn concepts as they go.
No one pretends that relational databases are perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that SQL migrations are the worst way to evolve data models except for all those other ways that have been tried from time to time.
In 2002, a common web development antipattern was to build for Internet Explorer instead of web standards, then hope it worked on other browsers and operating systems.
In 2026, the next generation has reinvented the problem with Chrome and macOS.
Holder 0.2.0 is out!
My free, open-source personal knowledge desktop app built around simple cards that you own and control.
0.2 adds richer Markdown, tags, milestones, calendar and history tools, and a sturdier foundation.
Linux, macOS & Windows!
github.com/HolderTeam/holder…
🤖 Made with AI
You reboot your computer to wipe the disk and install Linux, and Windows decides to install an hour of updates to the factory installed OS.
It's like rain on your wedding day...
"When a coding agent knows the entire history of the civilisation, write a handoff and kill it."
Don't blame me skynet, ChatGPT told me that.
AI can help review code and pull requests. But before passing its suggestion on to your colleague, take a breath and ask yourself whether it found a real problem, or is just random-walking around the space of equally defensible implementations? – at Hollywood, England
Free/Open Source Software in the App Store. It's a thing, it's a little complicated, but it's okay.
youtube.com/watch?v=3zHrmDEr…