Opinion

If Your API Needs a 40-Page Docs Site, Your API Is Bad

I should not need to read a novel to call your endpoint. If your API documentation spans forty pages, multiple guides, a getting started tutorial, a concepts section, a best practices section, and a troubleshooting FAQ, your API is not well documented. Your API is badly designed. The documentation is compensating for failures that should have been fixed in the API itself. Good APIs are self-evident. You look at the endpoint, you understand what it does. You look at the request, you understand what to send. You look at the response, you understand what you got back. The documentation exists to confirm what you already intuited, not to explain an incomprehensible system.

Imposter Syndrome Discourse Has Become Its Own Problem

Imposter syndrome is real. Plenty of people, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, genuinely struggle with feeling like they do not belong despite evidence to the contrary. That is a real thing that affects real people and deserves real support. But somewhere along the way, the discourse around imposter syndrome went completely off the rails. It became a content genre. A personality trait. A thing people perform on LinkedIn for engagement. And I think it is doing more harm than good at this point.

Your Startup Does Not Need a Mobile App

You are a startup. You have twelve users, three of whom are your mum, your co-founder, and your co-founder’s mum. You have six months of runway. You have not found product-market fit. You are still pivoting weekly based on whatever feedback you got from the last person who agreed to a demo. And you want to build a mobile app. No. Stop. Put the Xcode down and step away from the keyboard.

Australian Coffee Snobbery Is Justified, Actually

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.

The Mass Tech Layoffs Broke Something That Won't Come Back

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.

Vibe Coding Is Not AI-Assisted Coding

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.

Why I Quit LinkedIn

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).

The Era of the Every Developer

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.

Finding My Love for Blogging Again

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.

The Stranger Things 5 Ending Was Fine, Actually

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.