Matthew van Bird - Writing

People keep asking me for a diagram of this site, mostly because it loads so fast.

I get sent at least one of these a week.

The vouch A while back I reviewed a pull request that nobody on the team could explain, including the author.

Three copies of one schema The other day a team I work with wrote the same Snowplow schema three times.

Sixty milliseconds I had a read endpoint taking about 60ms to respond, and most of that made no sense.

Northumberland I'm camping in Northumberland, which is farm country, in a field ringed by other fields, and for days now I've watched the tractors.

The car park Three weeks ago a colleague approved a production deployment from a Tesco car park.

The cap A developer I know hit his monthly token ceiling on the 11th.

The setup We spent a few weeks wiring up what is, on paper, one of the strongest behavioural data stacks you can put together.

The premise Some version of this message lands in my DMs about once a fortnight.

The premise I use three AI tools in a normal week.

In 2025 I reviewed a 200 file pull request that nobody on the team could explain, including the author.

Background I was asked in a review why I'd used the Result pattern on a project, and why there was so little exception handling in it.

I spent a day "Vibe Programming" with Cursor.

Four libraries that half the .NET codebases I've worked on depend on changed their licence terms inside a year.

Let's talk Full-stack developer conjures up a tech superbro.

Background I'm using Contentful to drive UIs, allowing non-technical stakeholders to change what customers see.

Premise I've never wrestled much with "that's the way we do it".

At home you would delete an app that wasted ten minutes of your day.