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.
I recently chased a WordPress Multisite performance problem that made the admin feel unusable. Network screens like Sites and Plugins were taking about 20 seconds. That was on a healthy server and a database with no slow query alarms. It turned out to be a classic case of doing too much work on every admin request, hidden in a place most people do not look.
The fix was small and the impact was huge. If you run a large multisite, this is worth checking.
Neural DSP have dropped a teaser image and the guitar community is losing its collective mind. The silhouette shows an amp head with a wide, low profile and a centred leather strap handle sitting on top of a matching cabinet. No visible top vents. No boxy rack ears. No angled sides. If you know amps, you know what that shape is. It’s a Two Rock.
Ever since John Mayer was spotted playing through a Quad Cortex at Coachella back in April, speculation about a Neural DSP collaboration has been bubbling away in forums and comment sections. Mayer surprised everyone when he joined Zedd on stage and instead of wheeling out his usual Dumble-loaded rig, he plugged into Neural’s flagship modeller. The tones were reportedly spot on, and that kicked off months of “what if” conversations.
I get asked this question a lot. Usually with a tone somewhere between genuine curiosity and thinly veiled accusation. Where do you find the time? You have a full time job. You have kids. You have a wife. You have this blog. You have side projects. You take on contracting work. You contribute to open source. When do you sleep? Are you okay? Is this a cry for help?
The honest answer is that I have an incredibly understanding wife.