Thinking out loud.

I've been doing a bit of LUA development lately, I've played World of Warcraft for a couple of decades and never thought about giving it a go when I became a software engineer, partly because LUA always felt a bit dark magic to me, but it's been a real blast learning how to code in it lately.

Tonight Is a rare midweek evening that I can class as a 'night off'. Yet, I still find myself thinking about all of the interesting things I need to do tomorrow and the infinite possibilities of the things I want to throw myself into outside of my 9-5. Anyone else relate to that?

Just adding some finishing touches to a tehnical comparison between Microsoft .NET MAUI and Avalonia UI. These are the two leading frameworks for building cross-platform C# and XAML applications. Figured it was worth doing a bit of a review for 2026 seeing as how the barrier for building mobile apps is lower than ever.

You know you've lost it when you're considering throwing your hat in the ring for a Non-Executive Director and Member of the Board of Trustees position at the Alan Turing Institute. (because how cool would that be). I mean, even just for the valuable experience of seeing what kind of things they ask in an interview for those sorts of non remunerated roles, right?

I’ve been looking at ways to introduce some lightweight content management for the blog site. I recently explored the architecture for something similar on a friend’s website, which finally gave me a chance to take a proper look at Svelte. If you’re hosting a site built with a framework like Astro on an Azure Static Web App, I’d definitely recommend checking it out. I’m mainly using it to add comments and small updates on the fly.

I know it's a simple framework, but I realised this week how much I relay on the Eisenhower Matrix to actually plan out my daily and weekly tasks. If you haven't heard of it I suggest a quick Google, it's really basic; but sometimes that's all you need.

Genuinely insightful couple of days spent last week with my MSc cohort at Henley Business School. Genuinely think that networking is the most valuable component of this course.

I built a little Spotify Data Viewer over the weekend. You can request your data export from Spotify, drop the JSON files onto the page, and browse your streaming history, playlists, library, wrapped data, and even the ad-targeting inferences Spotify has made about you. It's a single HTML file, runs 100% client-side, and nothing leaves your browser. If you're curious what Spotify knows about you, give it a try or check out the source on GitHub.

This may come as a shock to some of you, but I am, even at my age, a World of Warcraft player and all round nerd. I have been playing since 2005, and I still find myself logging in every now and then to do some raids with friends. I am genuinely quite interested if things like DLSS 5 is going to be a game changer for games like WoW, which are notoriously CPU-bound and have struggled to keep up with the latest graphics advancements. I am hopeful that this could breathe new life into the game and make it more enjoyable for players like me who have been around for a while.

Has anyone tried using Claude Opus and some of the frontier models with Unity? I'm curious if the agentic capabilities of these models could be used to help me have a bash at creating a game. I have these impulses to 'prove' I can do a thing, and I think this might be the next one on the list.

I feel like having software engineering skills is seen as a great way to create passive income because you can quite literally build a product that people might want to buy. But, the real challenge is finding the time, even with agentic AI.

Did anyone else here about the slug algorithm? It's this it's used to rendering high-quality, resolution-independent text and vector graphics in 3D applications on the GPU. I read recently that the creator of the algorithm has decided to open source it after having a patent for the last 10 years or so. There's an interesting article about it here for anyone interested.

I really wanted an area on the site for quick, informal thoughts that didn't fit the format of a full blog post. I don't use Twitter (X), mainly Linked-in, perhaps I should work on that in the future. But for now, here is where I can type half-formed ideas people may never read, and throw them into the void.

Engineering as a Service (EaaS) is the idea that instead of building and maintaining your own engineering capabilities, you can consume them as a service from third-party providers. This is already happening in some ways with things like GitHub Copilot, which provides AI-assisted coding suggestions, but I think we're going to see this trend accelerate rapidly in the next few years. The implications of this are genuinely quite significant, both for how we build software and for who has access to the best tools and capabilities.