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.
I have been working remotely full time since 2018. Eight years. That is eight years of not sitting in traffic, inhaling the fumes of a thousand other miserable commuters while some breakfast radio hosts laugh at their own jokes. Eight years of being home. Eight years of being present for the moments that actually matter.
I watched my children take their first steps. Not on a grainy video my wife sent me while I pretended to care about Jira tickets in some open plan office. I was there. In the room. I saw it happen live. That is not a humble brag. That is the point. That memory exists because I was home, not because I got lucky with timing.
I have had more ideas than I can count. A notes folder full of app concepts, half-baked prototypes in forgotten repos, domain names I bought in a fit of optimism at 2am. Over a decade of this. Life gets in the way. Work gets in the way. Kids, mortgages, health, relationships, fatigue. The ideas pile up and the backlog grows.
If you look at my GitHub, you might think I ship a lot. Nearly 200 repositories. Aurelia plugins, blockchain games, CLI tools, a regex battle game, apps for finance tracking and tattoo previews and bedtime stories. From the outside it probably looks prolific. But I know what is missing. The projects that never left my head. The code that never got written. The things I talked about for years and never touched.
I have never been a TDD purist. The whole write-tests-first-no-exceptions religion always felt a bit much. Sometimes you are exploring. Sometimes you do not know what the code should do until you have written it. Sometimes you just need to ship the thing and circle back to tests later. I get it. I have lived it.
But AI assisted coding has changed my relationship with TDD. Not because I suddenly found religion, but because tests solve a very specific problem that AI introduces: you cannot trust the output.
Vince Gilligan has done it again. The creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul has delivered what might be his most unsettling work yet, and I’ve spent the better part of a week obsessing over it.
Oh, and spoiler alert. If you haven’t finished season one, stop reading now. I’m about to ruin everything.
Pluribus takes the alien invasion genre and does something genuinely disturbing with it. Instead of tentacled monsters destroying cities, we get seven billion people who are genuinely, authentically happy and desperately want you to join them. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets a wellness retreat, and I can’t stop thinking about it.