Australians are coffee snobs. This is not a stereotype. It is a fact. We are insufferable about it. We will complain about coffee in other countries. We will refuse to drink certain things. We will make faces at menu items that locals consider perfectly normal. We have opinions about milk texture that border on religious doctrine.
And you know what? We are right.
Australian coffee is genuinely, measurably, objectively better than what most of the world drinks. This is not nationalism. This is not bias. This is the truth, and I will not apologise for it.
I’ve built a Q&A platform where the worst answers win. It’s called AskBad and it’s exactly what it sounds like.
Look, we’ve already got Quora, StackOverflow, Reddit, and a dozen other places to ask questions and get helpful, well-researched answers from knowledgeable people. The internet is drowning in good advice. What we’re clearly missing is a dedicated space for absolutely terrible guidance.
AskBad started as a satirical reverse StackOverflow. You know those answers on Stack Overflow that make you question whether the person has ever touched a computer? Imagine a whole platform celebrating those. The worse your answer, the more upvotes you get. You earn negative karma. There are badges for being spectacularly unhelpful.
Between 2022 and 2024, the tech industry laid off somewhere around half a million people. Not contractors. Not underperformers. Engineers, designers, product managers, entire teams deleted in a single afternoon.
People who had been told they were essential, who had stock options vesting, who had relocated their families for these jobs. Gone. Often via email. Sometimes while locked out of their laptops mid-sentence.
The industry has moved on. Hiring is picking up. The job market is recovering. But something broke during those years that is not coming back, and I think we are only starting to understand what it was.
Somewhere in the last year, we collectively decided that typing prompts into an AI and hoping for the best counts as software development. Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” in February 2025, and what started as a cheeky observation has become an actual workflow for people shipping production code. This is a problem.
Let me be clear about something: I use AI coding tools every day. Claude, Copilot, Cursor. They’re genuinely useful. But there’s a massive difference between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding, and the industry seems determined to blur that line until someone’s startup implodes in a spectacular security breach.
I deleted my LinkedIn account. Not deactivated, not taking a break. Deleted. And honestly, it felt like finally unsubscribing from a newsletter I should have binned years ago.
LinkedIn has become an echo chamber of the worst kind. It’s not even a useful echo chamber where you might accidentally learn something. It’s a place where people post the same recycled motivational platitudes, agree with each other in the comments, and pat themselves on the back for being brave enough to share their hot take that nobody should work weekends (revolutionary stuff, truly).
I am a front-end developer. That is my main thing. JavaScript, TypeScript, component frameworks, state management, the DOM and all its quirks. I have spent years in this world and it is where I am most comfortable. If you need someone to build a reactive UI or argue about whether signals are better than virtual DOM diffing, I am your guy.
I am also a PHP developer. Have been for a long time. Back-end work, WordPress, Laravel, the lot. That is another core part of my toolkit that has served me well for years.
This site has been around for almost 16 years now. Sixteen years. I started it when I was younger, dumber, and convinced I had opinions worth sharing. Turns out I was right about one of those things.
I never studied English. I do not have a degree in writing or journalism or communications. Maths was always my weakness. Give me numbers and my brain starts looking for the exit.
But writing? Writing came naturally. Not because I am especially talented, but because I have always had things I wanted to say and writing was the cheapest way to say them. No barrier to entry. Just words on a screen and a publish button.
Every year, someone declares Aurelia dead. Every year, they are wrong.
It is 2026 and Aurelia 2 is not just alive, it is shipping features at a pace that would make frameworks with ten times our resources jealous. We have released more updates in the last twelve months than some “stable” frameworks manage in three years. The community is building. The core team is cooking. And the developers who actually use Aurelia instead of just talking about it on social media are shipping production applications while everyone else argues about which state management library to use this week.
The Stranger Things finale dropped on New Year’s Day and the internet has been losing its collective mind ever since. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score nosedived to 56%. Fans are furious. People are writing essays about how the Duffer Brothers betrayed them. There is a conspiracy theory that the real ending is coming in a secret Episode 9. It is chaos out there.
I thought the ending was fine.
Not perfect. Fine. Good, even. It reminded me of movies from the 80s and 90s, the era Stranger Things has been lovingly ripping off since the beginning. Those films had optimistic endings. E.T. goes home. The Goonies save their neighbourhood. Marty McFly gets back to the future and his dad is suddenly cool. There was hope. There was closure. The heroes won and you left the cinema feeling good.
It is not a secret anymore. Most developers use AI tools now. If you are not using something like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or even just pasting problems into ChatGPT, you are probably in the minority. The stigma has evaporated. Nobody is pretending they wrote every line by hand anymore.
Using AI to write code is just what we do now, like using Stack Overflow was ten years ago except the answers are usually better and you do not have to scroll past three people arguing about whether the question is a duplicate.