Oh I have shaved 500 yaks and I would shave 500 more more...
Director of Architecture @ fintech Consultant. Author. Rum, Alt Culture, Games & Metal. C#, TypeScript, OSS, MVP DevTechnologies. 🔗https://davidwhitney.co.uk/now - Other Socials @david_whitney on Twitter, when that helps the inevitable migration tools.
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Oh I have shaved 500 yaks and I would shave 500 more more...
"Everything eventually becomes a crab" 😂
"what are the qualities and properties that this design exhibits in this context - are they desirable outcomes for what we're trying to do"
Yes... Major improvements.... :/
Optional concentration glasses while at the computer but otherwise a clean bill of health! Tiny bit long sighted in my "old age" :)
X-treme marketing because the actual features are snake oil init
Somehow LinkedIn manages to be all the exhaustion of reading work emails, with all the dread of social media. Truly the most cursed platform.
Still is. C# walked so TypeScript can run. The Anders Hejlsberg programmatic universe is still OP. Nobody else has had so many stone cold hit languages that continue to age gracefully.
Much like "crab", industrial music is constantly re-evolving from first principles basically anywhere where there's a bunch of metal and plastic laying about
My hair has long been old enough to drink and vote 😂
Yeah, I suspect the game here is "so much content is watched on phones, surely we can go more space and bandwidth efficient".
Yeah, it's very trad-ML upscaling stuff. Just think the intersection of that and AI hypervigilance is interesting.
I reckon 21-year-old me would think I'm pretty cool to be still living that stereotype life at 41 though, which is possibly damning with faint self-praise haha. It's not a phase mum.
Someone has to look out for the godless heathens.
20 years between these two photos - whilst I do my best to exist outside of space and time, I guess I can see my age finally 😂
41 years old (yesterday) and going to get my first eye test today. Pray 4 me.
OP removed the link - it's this - waxy.org/2025/08/will...
waxy.org/2025/08/will...
Yeah people forget that it was kinda a low ebb / very uncommercial time in his career.
I love David Cage's games even if they're really compromised. That era of Bowie is best Bowie tho - Hours, 1. Outside et al - the "got into industrial" era.
Deep cut. Aged so badly but the first game that I remember trying to do the full cyberpunk city thing.
This is a fascinating look at the second order effects of the popularisation of model assisted content generation. A perfect storm - actual real imagery vs a frothing media that wants to string up anything that uses models, mulched out in the middle by low quality implementation.
Well now I have a new nightmare
Might make these stickers for people that like to abuse their laptops.
Commemerating new conference talks by being "back on my bullshit" with some fun new shirts
Yep, exactly that - it's not a surprise - but I think what people maybe haven't engaged with is that it's also reproducing cultural norms, not only "average code". It's encoding subtext - in the same way that ML encodes other forms of bias.
A models output is an exaggerated version of a language or communities anti-patterns by default. Like any programmer with just enough knowledge and not enough context.
... but each ecosystem anti-pattern is amplified by default. I love these tools, but if you're not re-working and co-authoring the outputs with refactoring iterations, you'll end up in a bad place.
Good software design all exists in context, so while the tools are powerful, the true vibe coded "just go with it" approach will yield mediocre to bad results frequently without authorial control. Incredible tools for experts that can provide that additional literacy...
Interesting observation re:model assisted code - vibe coded software exhibits the average anti-patterns of the languages culture and ecosystem. .NET vibe code trends towards enterprise over/no-design (services, managers et al) JavaScript vibe code is often spaghetti/full of mixed concerns
Blue Oyster Cult X Disney Adults. The odd banger though for sure. Always tickles me that their lead guitarist used to be in my all time third favourite band and went by the stage name Sodomiser at the time, which isn't quite the Ghost experience 😂
Every time I hear From Mars to Sirius I can't help remember how absolutely ahead of their time Gojira were when I saw them in '05/06 - there was just nothing like it at the time. Still sounds as good today.
Gojira definitely the most essential of those three live. Benefit from major European city touring schedule luck so seen both Gojira and Pendulum in both literally 50 ppl basements and arenas and they both hold in both. Ghost ain't my jam, but their show is grand. NIN live is my current high bar.
To be fair, top of the list of "if you could see any live band".
who was it :)
An Engovernance.
All things should be named like the collective nouns for animals.
A Resentment of Requirements.
A Misery of Misalignment.
A Confluence of Technical Debt.
Unsolicited recommendation - if you love deftones, the most recent Thornhill record is the best deftones album this year. Which isn't what I expected but hey, more good music is just... More!
Irony is not dead hey :)
Yes :)
I don't disagree - proceedural code just so frequently suffers it's own... formlessness. It's the mulch of tech debt everywhere. You can obviously write good proceedural code but I don't see much of it.
In fact, most of the ire you see against "object orientated code" is just ire against procedural code disguised as OO-code. And of course, yes, that stuff is bad.
Excuse me that was international tourism and those are souvenirs.
( youtu.be/M6zPS4YfEnY?... )
The glass is empty I drink from it nonetheless Is this loyalty? Or is it fear?
I only want the pure, distilled rage of someone with enough unbridled love or hate to put the effort it.
Every service class in a piece of software I see is just a place where mid-devs hide proceedural implementation due to chronic under-design. Can't name the thing? Service! Don't know what your abstraction is? Service! Anemic, undiscoverable, procedural code every time. ManagerClass for 2010-2025.
In retrospect inventing comments was a mistake really. The original sin. Bring back gatekeeping - if you want to shit on something on the internet learn to make a whole ass website to do it.
Reboot the whole damn technology industry.
Absolutely Kafkaesque to make the environmental artist redundant of a game where it's two component parts are "the environment" and "the controls" less than a week after launch. Reboot the games industry.
Not even close.
However much I kinda hate to say it, Thornhill still put out the best Deftones album this year. youtu.be/Kfj5YXnUXsI?...
Life's too short to be a dickhead when you can just say "no thanks".
It's kind of a shame because it seemed like he'd grown out of some of that rage in his old age, but it's always embarrassing when he does it, even if he's right. Being right and also being an asshole about it doesn't get anything done.
Yeah, guess we don't kink shame here but....
Also Edie Brickell's Good Times was the better of the two songs on the Windows 95 CD, because Weezer sucked then and suck now ;) Worse video though, will hand that to Weezer. youtu.be/iqL1BLzn3qc?...
Happy Windows 95 day. Non-ironically one of the most exciting early technology moments of my childhood. I remember trying out an interactive demo for Win3.1 that came on the front of Computer Shopper and being so excited for 95 to come out. Probably sad to say it's a "core memory", but it is.
Lifelong fan etc, just merely whelmed by it.
People whine about Gore but it had stacked hits like Hearts/Wires, (L)MIRL etc, same with Ohms, loads of big moments. Maybe it'll grow on me but its too shoegaze and washy. The Crosses record from last year is much better.
Listened to the new Deftones record about 8 times through today and I'm afraid it's really really mid. Like a 6/10 at best. Love the band, but it's formless and meandering. The singles didn't do it for me, next to no harsh vocals, no choruses, no big moments.
Wishing for more abused national iconography good, calling someone a coward, bad. What a time to be alive.
Lol got banned from my first ever subreddit tonight. I actually thought I was being too polite.
A regetable but acceptable trade if one must.
I have used all of those except quik. They all have compromises, and the ones that get popular all use the same jsx/hooks design as react anyway. That's the thing people think about when they think of react imo - less the framework itself. I like svelte "best", but it's toolchain is less stable.
I'd argue that it's a better generalisable solution than a thousand client and server implemented templating engines, frankly, because it could be part of the web standard. A page doesn't have to be an interpolation of markup and data contents, that's just one form of it.
All HTML is client side rendered. Is there really a semantic difference between the layout primaries and the data occuring as distinct elements in the payload - especially when that more naturally maps to the origin of the data? We have HTML snippets, why not binding conventions.
If people want to kill react, it's core capability - reactive model binding, needs building into browsers with a similar developer experience to have people run to the other end of the ship again.
None of that will happen unless model binding gets added to the DOM 🤷♂️ All for minimalism - but the plain forms don't meet UX expectations without just as much work, or even more cost, imo. There's a supposition in that piece that it's React+all of NPM, when react is popular because jsx is good.
(unless the complexity you're refering to is "there is JavaScript that runs in the browser" - which there definitely is, but as a complexity trade-off Vs running web servers et al, that's the lesser evil)
"it works for all my machines"
More complex than what though? That gets you a static site, with modern Dev tools, that basically just works. Server rendered probably is more, not less, for the same output.
Yeah, it's relatively new in its "basically just works" form (2-3 years) and is probably lesser well known because it's a multi source package manager that came out after chocolatey. Still, been scripting my windows installs for a decade or more.
npm install vite react react-dom Add an index.html and go. Ain't the hellscape of tooling chaos of a decade prior. It's the react version of ".NET is windows only!"
Honestly, getting a good react Dev stack together now takes like, a minute, and works really well. Five years ago? Yeah, sucked. Now, the lifting you have to do to inevitably reinvent react is worse. I appreciate it's a maximalist approach, but writing prog-enhance is more work than react in '25.
winget works just fine, fyi.
It's been the Lingua Franca of web app development for a decade - it's what the market knows.
It'll never stop being an unfortunate side-effect that tech that provides the means for unlimited learning and growth also facilitates the numbing of everything that helps you stay connected to your humanity. I wonder if balancing those two urges will be a generational marker thats lost over time.
There will always been a central conflict of retaining human connection as we build, abstract, systemise and scale ourselves. But lamenting that change happens is sobbing at the receding tide as if it won't return again. The fact the world always changes is a good thing.
I've never submitted to the doomer view of technology though. Two things are concurrently true - this will always change, as that's an artifact of changing times, and technology that brings progress often has undesirable second order effects. Only focusing on one or the other is a prison.
This video was recorded in the year of my birth - the consternation around technology could have been today. Conflicts around overreach, control, and the erosion of humanity. Maybe the techno-optimism I matured in was an abberation of the millennium. Fascinating watch. youtu.be/VwNWUNykqAs?...
In 2011 I came to a conference held in this hall in the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas that convinced me I could probably give the whole tech speaking thing a go. Perhaps it's idle sentimentality to take a photo of an empty convention centre hallway, but it feels important to me.
These *are* the good old days, always.
Noatalgia is a curse really. Weaponised happiness - you can never go back. All the more reason to always be in the present.
And the airport will never not make me think of Fallout: New Vegas.
Las Vegas, you've been real. A whirlwind of maximal Vegas experiences. I feel differently about this city each time I come here - and each trip is very different than the last. Hardly went near the strip this time other than a stroll today that made me feel extremely nostalgic for past adventures.
(Idle thoughts on a plane)
I know a lot of people are struggling to find their place in tech at the moment because it kinda feels like the wolves are at the door a lot of the time - my salve is knowing what I'm trying to do distinct from whatever the job is. It helps, but your answer will be your own.
I'm 99% sure that @thisisjofrank.bsky.social told me this, but it stuck in my mind.
A lot of folks I know have struggled with the anxiety of choice when trying to find a path forwards, and talking to some lovely folks at KCDC reminded me of a phrase I'd heard: "Stick the stickers". Don't be stuck as the child collecting pristine stickers and never using them. Life doesn't wait.
Incredible time at @kcdc.bsky.social this week - hope everyone had fun at my talks, had such a great time chatting to you all. Also, excellent conference adjacent chaos all round 🖤 Next...
Last session of the day with @davidwhitney.co.uk ! #kcdc2025 #MVPBuzz
It's no surprise that all the polymaths that invented the sciences were also artists.
Which is ironic because science is absolutely meaningless without humanity and culture to consume it's works. I'll take a world without better rocket ships over a world without music every single time.
Fair
Stan culture is pure distilled brainrot. (No problem at all with Swift, seems like a good person, but cannot fathom how "don't align your personality to a brand" got so utterly reversed in popular culture)
GitHub is pure utility, as is all SCM - the positioning is controversial optics but the independence seemed notional at best.