Category: Technical
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Gutenberg, Technical Debt, and the Art of Waiting for Maturity
Many have argued that WordPress’s Gutenberg blocks were the way forward. In fact, I remember a conversation with colleagues back in 2014, debating whether blocks were the future and if we should build such a system ourselves. But there was a problem. We knew that doing it well would be incredibly hard. There are key…
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A Xmas story involving AI
AI, through the current set of large language models, is a wonderful tool. But like all powerful tools, it must be wielded with care and intelligence. One thing I’ve noticed is that people, instead of coming up with some simple needs, have taken to over-egging their requirements. Instead of “let’s do some marketing” you get…
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The AI locusts and the inevitable outcome for publishers
We had a problem over at Design Week recently. The server was groaning a little bit and a huge amount of bandwidth being eaten up. On investigation, it seemed to be a bot that was stuck in a loop, reading the same content again and again and again. Always the same handful of URLs.
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Will there be a successful WordPress fork?
Lately, the WordPress community and even the broader web community has spent a lot of time thinking about WordPress and what might happen with respect to a fork. All largely kicked off by the huge spat Matt Mullenweg has had with WP Engine that has already resulted in legal action against him, which he is…
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AI is predictive, not intelligent
I hope you haven’t missed the big AI revolution going on right now? No? Yes? YES? You have no idea about it? Where do you live? On Mars? Ah OK, you were kidding. AI is being talked about everywhere, new devices like the Humane AI Pin or the Rabbit R1 are very much about it,…
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The astonishing power of modern computing
Being very old (or at least, that’s how I feel being in tech!) means that after coming up to nearly forty years in technology, I’ve seen some changes. My first computer at home, that I owned, that I could truly call my own, was a Dragon 32. It was a small, 32KB computer using the…
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The productivity paradox
I came across this chart recently and it gave me pause for thought as someone whose life work is designed to improve productivity. It shows that from 2008, although we know technologies have been growing in power, productivity growth suddenly dropped away from the trendline following the global financial crisis. Why? This is where I…
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Off-Cloud Backup for Heroku apps – a possible answer
The Heroku platform is an absolutely fantastic way to have to not bother with devops within a small development company. We’ve been using it at interconnect for years now, and whilst it’s not entirely perfect, it takes away one set of headaches and does so at a reasonable cost. All the services offer backups, and…
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Interesting times in the world of software
About a decade ago, I was at a conference and talking to a fellow developer (I still call myself one, even though I don’t code so much these days) when he giddily told me about the funding he’d got for building a new piece of software he was hoping would make it big. It was…
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Twitter is about to die. Here’s why.
Something odd has started to happen on Twitter for me, and it’s cutting my usage of it down quite dramatically. Why? It’s because it seems the spammers are winning… https://twitter.com/nrhansonp/status/318959016602660864 https://twitter.com/fierofan11q/status/318758157247709184 https://twitter.com/DavidThiebaudc/status/318665593605738497 https://twitter.com/catazettler3/status/318327663506890752 https://twitter.com/clintonxbaurer/status/318093880182591488 Every. Single. Day. I get lots of these. Some disappear into the ether, others remain on the Interactions tab on Twitter….