So much is happening in my life, work and brain this week that I'm unable to even begin to express it all here. Suffice to say that uncertainty and change are the two biggest forces operating in my universe right now, though hopefully for a limited timeframe.

I've picked out some interesting reads this week that have helped me examine the world, learn new things, or just laugh – give them a look.

And also: a book recommendation. I was a big fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time (a must for any sci-fi fans) and someone at work recommended his more recent Service Model, which I just finished.

Yesterday we got the results of the local elections, which took place on Thursday. On the day of voting I was busy playing space-themed mini golf with my son, whose school was closed for the day because it's the local polling station.

This always infuriates me: partly because I have to take a day off work (or risk parking the kid in front of a TV all day while I try to attend meetings), and partly because it's asking a hundred local children to lose a day of education so that—if we're lucky—40% of the eligible local voters actually show up and participate in democracy.

But this time they did turn out: our local, longstanding Labour candidate lost by a couple of hundred votes to the Green insurgency. I felt for her: she's been very visible locally for a long time, and made things happen when we needed her. But I also suspect that voting Labour in 2026 is a very difficult ask, even for former party loyalists.

Humans have been writing code for a long time now, and we've gotten pretty good at it.

Not only have we come up with abstractions built on top of abstractions (to avoid having to write the kind of machine code that the computer itself reads), but we've evolved tooling and workflow conventions which have gradually supplanted all competitors until they became the accepted norm for software development.

But humans aren't writing all the code anymore. The AI revolution is real, indeed it's already happened – and now the world's foremost code storage platforms are struggling to keep up. GitHub recently posted a blogpost acknowledging their struggle to survive the onslaught of automated traffic hitting its servers. Large software projects and their leadership are announcing their lack of confidence in the traditional platforms for code collaboration (full disclosure: I work for one of these platforms) and, even discounting all the hype, the impact of all this stuff really does feel like it's significant, this time.

I keep hearing about "software factories", eg. the creation of an autonomous set of tools and pipelines so even the least-technical person with an idea can prompt a set of AI agents to spin up a new software project, launch strategy, user ticketing system and roadmapping functionality. The term "factory" feels pejorative to me: I don't want to be a factory boss, like some Marxian nightmare, harnessing the output of my army of robot agents. There's a brewery whose beers I enjoy, but whose name I despise: Bristol Beer Factory. I want my beer brewed by some nerd who can tell Nelson from Hallertauer just from the hop aroma, not churned out by a "factory".

Forgive me, Father for I have sinned. It’s been one year since my last newsletter.

I kind of know how this happened.

Last March I started a new job. I was in at the deep end: my first time working for an actual tech company, after fifteen years of being a software engineering professional. I suddenly had a lot on my plate, and a lot to prove.

I also decided that a good use of the leftover redundancy money from my 2024 layoff was to finally get hitched Civil Partnered with my beloved Madeleine. That day in early September 2025 was amazing and special and I’m so glad we did it, but it was also intense, stressful and tiring (just like being married to me, I imagine).

Last week I went to church.

My family brought me and my sisters up as Christians, attending church each Sunday morning and all of us coming to play parts in the various functions of the local parish: kids helping run Sunday School and singing in the choir for weddings; parents organising the music for services and holding leadership roles within the church structure. It was a big part of everyone’s life for a while back there.

None of us attend regularly any more, though I think the rest of my family still maintain their faith in their own way. Once I finished secondary school, I went through all the teenage atheist clichés and haven’t really thought about it since.

Faith has come up again recently in a few ways, though. My son is almost six and is exposed to a wide range of religions and cultural practices, one of the reasons we love living where we do. I found out recently, though, that a group of local Christian leaders have been coming into his school to run “Open The Book” sessions – a national program where kids are taught Bible stories, often dressing up and recreating them.