Pragmatism in today's world
Last week I attended FOST London 2026, mostly I was there for apidays and the OpenAPI Initiative track. As ever, there was a set of excellent talks and I particularly liked Abby Bangser's opening keynote, Steven Willmott's talk on how to think about software systems as AI is added to them, and Kristof Van Tomme's thoughts on where developer portals fit into today's AI world. The OpenAPI track was excellent. We started with Frank Kilcommins… continue reading.
I nearly always open Sublime Text from the command line using subl and have specific requirements for when it should open a new window or re-use one. If I'm opening a directory, then I would like it to re-use the same window if I have previously opened that directory. However if I open a random file, I never want that file in the last directory window as it's unrelated. To do this I wrote a… continue reading.
For OSS work, I work with two git remotes: upstream: the canonical OSS project repository, where main is the default branch and is what gets released. origin: a personal fork. All my feature branches live here. I set up locally like this: Fork the project repo to my account. Clone my fork locally, so the origin remote is my fork. Set an upstream remote using git remote add upstream <ssh-url>. and then when working on… continue reading.
I have a new project where we will be integrating with a third party API that is currently being written. Due to Conway's Law, we are being sent new versions of the OpenAPI spec as a set of JSON files via email. I quite like seeing the HTML rendering of an OpenAPI spec when reading it and understanding it, so I knocked up a simple shell script that takes an OpenAPI spec file and outputs… continue reading.
Recently I discovered that this code passed our PHPStan level 10 checks: use http\Exception\InvalidArgumentException; // … throw new InvalidArgumentException; I was surprised as http\Exception\InvalidArgumentException is not a class in our system. While cooling, I discovered that there's an http PHP extension and it appears that PHPStan has a stub for this which means that it accepts it as existing even if it doesn't. What we think happened is that I wrote throw new InvalidArgumentException; and… continue reading.
Today has been a struggle entirely due to my own internal negative thoughts and feelings about impacting events that are outside my control. Navigating this to come out stronger rather than letting it consume my self-belief and confidence isn’t easy, especially at the time. I’m not worse at my job and my abilities haven’t diminished, but sometimes it’s hard to remember this. I need to give myself space to remember who I am and internalise… continue reading.
I don't often post personal things here, however last weekend my dad died peacefully in his sleep and it feels important to acknowledge this. I have no words.
As we reach the end of 2025, I take this opportunity to look back over the photos that I have taken and thing about the year. This year I published 1,064 photos to Flickr with, of course, at least one photo every day as part of my Project 365. The lovely thing is that my photos remind me what happened during my year and I remember many good times through them as I've seen friends… continue reading.
I've recently upgraded my MacBook Air to macOS 26 Tahoe and one thing I noticed was that Rodeo's rules were no longer working. With the help of exiftool, I worked out that when exporting to JPEG from Photos for macOS 26 Tahoe, the Object Name, Caption-Abstract and Keywords IPRC properties were no longer being populated. This is a regression from macOS 15 Sequoia. This is the data from exiftool. Output from macOS 15 Sequoia: $… continue reading.
Sometimes it's helpful to add some text to my current Obsidian daily note without having to switch to Obsidian, find the daily note and then type my text. To do this, we can use the magic of Obsidian's obsidian:// URI schema and automate the text capture in Apple Shortcuts, with an assigned keyboard shortcut to activate it. This is the Shortcut: There's a number of steps in the Shortcut. Firstly we Ask For some text… continue reading.
