I'm writing this from Reus "Barcelona" airport (Barcelona gets air quotes in the same way that "London" Luton does) after a week in Tarragona (see!) for a work trip. The European heatwave is still in full effect and I've never experienced higher temperatures or humidity than this week. Not the best setup for long, intense days meeting my all-remote colleagues in person for the first time, but when life gives you overly-hot lemons, you... make warm sangria?

I haven't seen my kids or partner for most of a week and I'm very excited to be home and to see them, although they'll all be asleep by the time I finish writing this, board my flight, and figure out the quickest way home from the airport on a Friday night.

A quick family holiday follows next week, and then we move house in the first week of August. Our first move in over eight years, and our first with kids. It's a huge moment and likely represents the absolute peak of my spreadsheet-planning organisation goals. I'll almost be sad to no longer have a "project".

It'll be hard bidding goodbye to our home. My daughter was born in the house, for one thing. We've transformed it from a generic-looking show home into something with a little personality, and the various improvements, enhancements and quirks we've given it will (hopefully) be valued by the new owners. The new house is objectively better in almost every aspect, minus (of course) the presence of a garden shed fully outfitted as a music studio. I'm going to miss that place.

As I desperately try to wrap up packing ahead of the move, I'm also trying to complete some new music. I was hoping to release a full album again but I've stalled at 7 songs and have decided to defuse the situation and release an EP instead, trimming a couple of the less-finished tracks out. The new house will have a home office for me, but the adjoining wall is with our new neighbours, who I'm sure won't want to hear my trying to record vocals for a piano ballad slightly out of my range at 11pm at night. Hence the urgency to finish the songs while I still have a shed in the garden to record them in.

So I sit here on the edge of things: a flight home to my loved ones, a move to a new place and a new phase of life, and a month or so away from turning 40. I'm excited for all of these things and want to stop thinking about them, and just live them. But first I have to wait.

Reading this week

1. What Becoming a Parent Really Does to Your Happiness (Paul Bloom, the Atlantic)

"Children make some happy and others miserable; the rest fall somewhere in between—it depends, among other factors, on how old you are, whether you are a mother or a father, and where you live. But a deep puzzle remains: Many people would have had happier lives and marriages had they chosen not to have kids—yet they still describe parenthood as the “best thing they’ve ever done.” Why don’t we regret having children more?"

A good piece examining the dichotomy of being a parent whose life is objectively less happy after they have kids, while they also claim that raising kids is the best thing they'll ever do. This certainly mirrors my feelings on it: parenting is exhausting, stressful, threatens your entire previous identity... but if I died tomorrow, the only thing I'd regret is not having more time with my kids (and partner, but that's not the theme of this article).

2. Deckchair shuffling is for the unserious (Tom Loosemore)

"Merging Whitehall departments causes at least a year of internal mayhem, distracting from what Ministers actually care about. Senior officials get bogged down haggling over org charts, roles and pay, while merging IT systems is a nightmare with no end. This government has barely two years to show voters improved services, and you want to waste a year shuffling deckchairs?"

Tom Loosemore knows all about Whitehall nonsense, having co-founded the Government Digital Service. His comments here refer to rumours about new PM Andy Burnham planning to disband the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation. I hope folks in power read voices like Tom's before they throw the baby out with the bathwater.

3. Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? (Sam Learner, Financial Times)

"Recently, Stenberg and the load-bearing internet people have faced a new problem. The availability of AI coding tools, which spit out code in response to plain-language prompts, has led to a huge influx of proposed code contributions. Most of them are not very good. Some appear useful, but miss important context or don’t function quite right. Some function fine, but are not particularly helpful and still take time to review. These submissions come from people who mean well, and from people chasing the clout of contributing to a foundational piece of software. They come from professional developers, as well as from so-called vibe coders, writing exclusively with AI tools, sometimes without the ability to understand the output."

This is super long so bear with it, but it describes the problem well for non-specialists and contextualises what's been happening to the software industry in the last few years. I know some of the folks quoted in this piece and they describe the chaos well, especially Rich Harris saying "the idea that you would effectively pay rent to a Silicon Valley company for the privilege of being able to write software would have been considered completely absurd"

Fun and miscellany this week

1. London? (The Talk of the Street Podcast)

A short compilation video of every time a character in Coronation Street mentions London, and somebody else reacts with a histrionic "London?". Brilliant.

2. Andy Serkis Gets Asked Why New ‘Lord of the Rings’ Cast Is All White Actors (Zack Sharf, Variety)

"“Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology, there’s a lot of that feeling,” Serkis explained about the lack of the diversity. “The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know… They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of The Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in.”"

I love the Lord of the Rings movies but I have almost no desire for the glut of new productions to be made. Andy Serkis should know better than this take, too: yes, in the books, the Shire is presented as closed, ignorant of the wider world and suspicious of outsiders. But he seems to think that putting anyone non-white in the movies would be "politically correct", rather than... just following the description of the characters as written? The Harfoot hobbits are "browner of skin", for example. Serkis shouldn't be giving this criticism the dignity of a reply, but instead he's pointlessly doubling down on it.

3. Two people try to enter a screening of The Odyssey hiding inside a miniature model of the Trojan Horse (@mewefree.bsky.social)

I don't care if this is staged; this is the sort of nerdy effort I live for.