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.
I have been playing guitar for twenty years. I am not bad. I learned plenty in those two decades. I can play songs. I know my chords. My power chords are tight. I have decent timing and I can hold my own in most situations.
The catch is that I spent those twenty years playing metal and hardcore. Downtuned riffs. Chugging palm mutes. The occasional breakdown where everyone in the room loses their minds. I got very good at a very specific type of guitar playing. The kind where subtlety goes to die and the only dynamic is loud versus louder.
Every morning at 9:15, a dozen developers shuffle into a room or log into a video call to answer the same three questions they answered yesterday. What did you do? What will you do? Any blockers?
We have been doing this ritual for so long that questioning it feels like questioning gravity. Stand-ups are just how teams work. Everyone does them. They must be valuable.
Except they are not. The daily stand-up, as practiced in most organisations, is not a communication tool. It is a surveillance mechanism dressed up in Agile clothing. And in 2025, with distributed teams and async-first tooling, it has become an actively harmful anachronism that we keep doing because nobody wants to be the person who suggests we stop.
Volume 2 just dropped and it rewrote everything we thought we understood. Turns out the Upside Down is not a parallel dimension at all. It is a wormhole. A bridge between Hawkins and another realm called the Abyss, or Camazotz as Holly names it after A Wrinkle in Time.
Here is the chain of events as we now understand them:
The Abyss is where the Demogorgons, Mind Flayer, and all the monsters actually come from Eleven banished Henry Creel there in 1979, where he evolved into Vecna On November 6, 1983, Brenner had Eleven unknowingly search for Henry using her powers When her mind made contact with the Abyss, she accidentally created the wormhole we know as the Upside Down Brenner stabilised it using exotic matter suspended above Hawkins Lab The Upside Down is frozen in time at the moment of its creation, which is why everything looks like 1983 This is infrastructure, not magic. And infrastructure can be destroyed.
I recently spent a few days poking around the network protocol that the Line 6 Helix Stadium XL uses to communicate with its editor software. It started as idle curiosity during the Christmas break and turned into a proper reverse engineering session. By the end I had mapped out the message format, figured out how model IDs work, and learned enough to build my own tooling if I wanted to.
Something is happening in front-end development that nobody wants to talk about. A generation of developers are entering the workforce who can build beautiful interfaces but cannot explain how a flexbox actually works. They can ship features faster than ever, but the moment something breaks in a way Tailwind does not account for, they are completely stuck.
I am not here to bash Tailwind. I use it. It is a genuinely good tool that solves real problems. But we have collectively confused “faster” with “better” and are now paying the price in technical debt and mass-produced helplessness.
With Christmas approaching and work stopping for the year, naturally with more free time what does a developer with a brand new Helix Stadium XL do when they see the editor communicates over WiFi for editing? You go digging into how it works and here’s what I’ve discovered. I really should be drinking eggnog and doing nothing, but as other devs know it’s hard to stop sometimes, haha. I like to keep busy.