Thinking out loud.

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.

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 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.

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.