The All Stars game last night was conclusive proof of how new media has taken a large market share away from old media. The fans were there to see the DDF crew play. It's a whole new world now.

With small companies, the person (or people) responsible for hiring sets the tone of the entire workplace. If the person responsible for hiring developers is himself a competent developer, he'll usually be able to see through the bullshitters. If a bullshitter slips through then they're awkwardly let go as part of their probationary period. For better or worse this maintains a sort of baseline standard.

At $ENTERPRISE, nobody gets fired. Your only risk of job loss is being "made redundant" as part of the ever-changing company structure. The lack of performance related churn creates a self perpetuating competency problem; the inconsistency of new hires reflects the inconsistency of your coworkers.

This creates incredibly surreal situations like the head of [something technical] not knowing how to use a computer, or an analyst [of something important] not being able to speak English. The reports you receive aren't really coherent, but there are a lot of em dashes. You know the absurdity of the situation, they know the absurdity of the situation, but the show must go on until one of you gets made redundant. There's never an incentive to mention these elephants in the room.

Whilst no company is immune from hiring that just doesn't quite work I feel like at enterprise this situation described above is more common. It makes me feel like I've picked good companies to work for so far in my career.

Another example of where Stableford can be a joke sometimes.

Another link to Sports Bizarre but this is another absolutely fascinating story.

The whole transfer saga moving from Barcelona to Napoli with the involvement of the mafia, the fact that Napoli was a very working class city and the turmoil of his personal life. Just an incredible story.

We've had some cracking Sunday mornings this winter. This one is from Woolamai Surf Beach.

Bring back the power stance. Collingwood need to bring this energy in two weeks time.

We did it! September 4th. Huge news in the gaming industry.

Watched Heat for the first time last night. What a phenomenal movie it is. Amazing acting and filmography. A masterpiece.

It makes me want to check out all of Michael Mann's work as a director.

Join us in 48 hours for a special announcement about Hollow Knight: Silksong!

We might finally see more of the game and get an actual release date. A shadow drop would be crazy but I'm here for that.

Completing a Pokedex in a Pokemon game is something I've never done.

In recent weeks I've been playing through Pokemon Ruby and I think I'm at a point now where completing the Pokedex might actually be possible.

I've been playing via by favourite emulator OpenEmu and as usual the emulation experience has been great. But OpenEmu lacks one feature that's critical for completing a Pokedex; trading.

Without trading you:

• Can't do evolution trades
• Won't be able to access Pokemon that are exclusive to one game
• Can only access 1 of the 3 starters

Luckily another emulator mGBA has a multiplayer window feature which opens up the possibility of "single player" emulator trades.

To do this I needed to:

• Download and open the mGBA app
• Have a .gba and .sav file for 2 different Pokemon games, for me it was Ruby and Sapphire
• Make sure you're at least past the first gym in both games, this opens up trading
• Open up the first .gba file in the emulator (Pokemon Ruby for me), then go File > New multiplayer window to open up a second window, in this second window open up the second .gba file (Pokemon Sapphire for me)
• You will likely need to go File > Save games > Load temporary save game and select your .sav file to actually access the save state in the multiplayer window
• In both games go to the trading location in the Pokemon Center
• Thanks to emulator magic the 2 different games are able to connect and you'll be taken into the trading room where you can trade Pokemon
• Once you're done just save to create a new .sav file

I think I've linked to Derek Sivers blog once but his posts are an absolute treasure trove. I think this particular post is taken from his book Hell Yeah Or No.

Whether you’re a student, a teacher, or a parent, I think you’ll appreciate this story of how one teacher can completely and permanently change someone’s life in only a few lessons.

Before I met Kimo, I was just a kid who wanted to be a musician, doing it casually. Ever since our five lessons, I’ve had no speed limit. I owe every great thing that’s happened in my life to Kimo’s raised expectations. A random meeting and five music lessons showed me that I can do way more than the norm.

Well, I want you to visit my website. I want you to read an article from a search result, and then discover the other things I’ve written, the other people I link to, and explore the weird themes I’ve got. I want some of you to read my article then ask me to speak at your conferences. Many folks rely on ad impressions to support the high-quality content they’re putting out for free.

I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them. I’m writing about things I care about because I like sharing and I like teaching. I spend hours writing these posts and AI spends seconds summarising them.

I'd much rather people read the whole thing, take it in, digest it and have opinions right back at me. I love it when people connect with what I’m writing (and sometimes they email me to tell me that, which is really delightful).

I don’t write these posts for VC-funded LLMs to come along and gobble up and produce some shitty facsimile, or summarise what I’m saying with none of the nuance or context on someone else's website.

This website is for humans, and LLMs are not welcome here.

This is a fun little blog. I've added the feed to my RSS reader.

I'll play Wind Waker as my next game. I think I'm ready for another Zelda experience. I previously played a fair way through the game but never completed it.

This year has been fucked.

It's a very blunt viewpoint but I think its the best way to describe things.

The year started rough with mum having to get her bladder removed. She's been incredible strong mentally and has recovered quickly but it was still a bad time.

Me and Emma got married in February. It was the best day of my life.

We went on our honeymoon in March to Vietnam. Apart from getting really bad food poisoning it was a wonderful experience.

In April, Emma's dad had some health complications in China which led to a brain bleed. Me and Emma took some time off work and flew to Beijing to be with him and Emma's mum Annie. It was a scary time but thanks to some high quality health care he pulled through. It was a reminder for why you need great insurance when travelling.

The happy side of this was that me and Emma had 2 nights in Hong Kong on the way home where we went to Disneyland.

May and June were generally normal. We tried to get back into routine and the normal swing of things.

On the 1st of July we received potentially the worst shock we've ever had with Boots' cancer. It was painful and mentally exhausting. It was the final straw of getting mostly bad luck this year.

And now we're in August. Boots is now in a better place where he's not in pain.

Me and Emma have to carry on with our lives.

But as they say in Dead Poets Society:

Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.

Me and Emma have been doing some crazy planning with this in mind.

We initially thought about doing a big Australian road trip. Where we landed with this was:

• Buying a van proved to be very tricky, we tried to use Facebook Marketplace but actually finding something that worked for us in a limited time frame was tough
• The whole idea was very expensive and we would have needed to borrow some money
• We'd love to do this trip one day, the best way to do it is to buy a "cheap" Toyota HiAce which is mechanically sound and then pay someone to fit it out properly, then hit the road with more confidence
• Working remotely for me would have been tricky being on the road so much, Starlink makes this easier but we would have faced some challenges

We had a reset on the crazy idea and thought about what we both wanted. Emma wanted to go somewhere warm.

I looked at Google Maps and saw that just north of Australia was Bali. It's warm, cheap and is still within the Australian timezone so I could work remotely for a short time frame. Me and Emma talked more about it and researched costs for Airbnbs. It was within our budget.

So our new plan is:

• We're going to Bali
• We leave on the 8th of September and will be back in ~3 months
• I'll work remotely, Bali is 2 hours behind AEST (3 when day light savings hits)
• Emma will take long service leave and do part time remote work in December
• We'll stay in 3 different Airbnbs across the 3 months in Canggu, Ubud and Uluwatu

So yes, this year has been fucked but it's also been a year of travel and challenge. I think this 3 months will be awesome for me and Emma.

It's a reminder of how life never really plays out as you'd expect it to. There was a comment I read this week in this Hacker News thread which is pretty applicable:

Not a trick of the programming trade, but: life will not be clean, smooth and according to plan. Learn how to deal with things getting messy and derailed, and to accept that you "lost your streak" or whatever. Tomorrow is a new day, it is always ok to start over.

Do optimize for the long term, but also realize you could be dead by next morning.

we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don't know their actual physical location it will be possible in that age perhaps only fifty years from now for a man to conduct his business from tahiti or bali just as well as he could from london in fact if it proves worthwhile almost any executive skill any administrative skill even any physical skill could be made independent of distance i am perfectly serious when i suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in edinburgh operating on patients in new zealand when that time comes the whole world will have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of the city as a meeting place for man would have ceased to make any sense in fact men will no longer commute they will communicate they won't have to travel for business anymore they'll only travel for pleasure i only hope that when that day comes and when the city is abolished the whole world isn't turned into one giant suburb

This is a bad YouTube transcription but it's still readable. It's an old clip from the BBC (1964) that I actually saw at the start of the Blackberry movie. What an insanely accurate prediction.

A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.

Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal journals or microblogs inside your team’s chat app, a lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion.

People typically post short updates 1-3 times per week. Common topics include:

• ideas related to current projects
• musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback
• “what if” suggestions
• photos from recent trips or hobbies
• rubber ducking a problem

This is really cool and we probably should do this at work.

I've been really enjoying my Pokemon Ruby play through in the past few weeks. It's been a nice distraction in my sad moments. It's again a reminder of how damn good these Pokemon games are.

This is my current squad.

It's a nice mix of dark/ghost, grass, psychic, water, rock/ground and fighting types. It is technically cheating but I like to use the dual type charts to figure out what's going to work well in battles.

The games pixel art is gorgeous and the music is sublime. In my opinion, it's one of the most incredible pieces of art ever created.

Again DHH is a bit of an asshole but some of his software engineering based views are interesting and challenge conventions. I have not watched the whole 6 hours of this!

DHH has some wild things to say but his push for Linux is backed by facts.

Linux has slowly been increasing in popularity in the USA. His reasoning around the Steam Deck as well as a couple of popular influencers for the growth in Linux is 100% a factor.

If I had the money to buy a new computer today I would very much consider a Framework and run Linux on it.

Great article on why fast matters in software. Linear is always a good example.

Fast eliminates cognitive friction. Raycast surfacing the right application before you finish typing feels like an extension of your mind. Superhuman's sub-100ms rule—plus their focus on keyboard shortcuts—changed the email game in a way that no one's been able to replicate, let alone beat. I recently used Mercury to pay another business that uses Mercury, and its instant settle felt surprising in a world where bank transfers usually take days.

This is because the effort to make software fast often requires stripping away non-essential features. Compare how fast a streamlined project management tool like Linear loads versus an enterprise app like Workday (or worse… Oracle). In a world obsessed with adding rather than refining, speed becomes the ultimate expression of respect. It says, "We've thought deeply about what matters and eliminated everything else."