Nat Torkington

Telluride House Band media See Jake Schepps’s excellent history of the Telluride House Band for context.

By day I’m the CTO at a 40+ year old software company that makes an on-premises ERP built on Microsoft technology.

(I wrote this on BlueSky.

The most fun thing about using Claude has been realising I have a standard way of working, one that I need to tell the agent because all too often the LLM’s default way of working is messy and accident-prone.

I am weary of the slopwords that LLM prose now becomes.

I’ve been publishing my Claude Code skills to a marketplace I set up.

The inspiration for this site’s redesign.

See the Intro for context. [20221231] 36 Things I Learned in 2022 – #1 blew my mind: For the first time in history in 2020, the weight of things produced by humans (concrete, metals, plastic) was greater than the weight of the global living biomass. [2022…

See the Intro for context. [20221231] EndBasic – BASIC with cloud, DOS-like GUI.

See the Intro for context. [20221231] Job Drain Pattern – we make heavy use of this internally.

See the Intro for context. [20221223] PEACH Framework for Cloud Security – risks associated with customer-facing interfaces and determines: the complexity of the interface as a predictor of vulnerability; whether the interface is shared or duplicated per…

See the Intro for context. [20220203] Tree/Loop Prompts Our ability to ________ is a function of our ability to ________ ________ has a number of contributing factors, including ________ When ________ [increases/decreases] we would expect to see __________

See the Intro for context. [20221231] Four Day Work Week Going Well – 97% of the 495 respondents want to stay with a four-day workweek and so do the 27 companies that responded. [20221223] 20 Great Open Questions – for coaching and more. [20221221] Engine…

I used to read a lot of the technical web and social media for O’Reilly Media, where I wrote the daily “Four Short Links” digest.

See the Intro for context.

See the Intro for context. [20221231] React Admin – claims of a full-featured data grid, which is 50-80% of many of our apps.

See the Intro for context. [20221231] Temporal.io – With Temporal, you write your various complex, potentially long-running actions as normal, synchronous code, which Temporal “magically” turns into distributed, asynchronous, automatically retried, idempo…

See the Intro for context.

Last updated: 2022-04-10 Bandcamp is a great place to buy music, because most of the money you pays goes straight to the artist.

I’ve seen a few people propose a big government project around 5G mobile technology.

Here’s a braindump of some things I’ve learned over the years.

Looks like NZ will get a CTO real soon now.

There’s an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ’s R&D incentives.

I asked my Twitter friends for recommendations of books to read over Christmas.

Hello, American friends!

I was just catching up on Tim Kong’s excellent blog, when I read this great quote from Dan Carter: “One thing we talk about over and over with this current All Blacks side is about never focusing on the outcome.

(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration.

Job titles don’t matter, because it’s the work that counts.

It’s bloody hard to build something new into the world.

tl;dr: Today’s NZ Herald drove me to this analysis/rant.

[I posted this on a Slack recently, and would like to give it a longer life than Slack’s 10,000 line scrollback.

This post is prompted by The engagement era - and the artist’s place within it, written by Courtney Johnston (director of the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt).

I write a short daily series for O’Reilly Media, Four Short Links, which I’ve done for years.

Teamwork shares a lot of good practices with parenting.

When I was recruiting the fabulous Chris McDowall for a job, he asked me “why do YOU work here?”

I was asked for comment by Bill Bennet from the NZ Herald, for a piece on Kiwi startups moving to Silicon Valley.

In this internal 1972 DEC memo (PDF) about the PDP-16 re-release, modern tech companies should find plenty of familiar territory: While the PDP-16 has been marginally successful to date, some problems have been noted. 1.

I moderated a panel today at Gather on the topic of “Work”.

“Digital citizenship” is a phrase I encounter often in my educational travels.

Telecom New Zealand is changing its name to Spark.

I caught up with Jesse Robbins at Foo Camp, and he gave me a great line that I remember as being something like: “I’m going on an adventure.

Andreas Schleicher runs the PISA programme for the UN.

(this post is about the New Zealand education system.

The NZ Arts Foundation has launched Boosted, a way to crowdfund arts projects.

Kiwi Foo Camp just ended.

Katherine Mansfield is New Zealand’s literary icon: feminist, bisexual, incredibly gifted, part of the Bloomsbury circle of clever people pushing literary form before she died of tuberculosis.

Things I learned while I was too busy to write week notes: if you don’t do it, it won’t get done (“delegate” qualifies as “doing”); learning to delegate is as hard as learning to do the task itself was, and you’ve got to learn to delegate NOW; (related) s…

(belated) Monday was a big day: I confirmed the hiring of my first employee, and gave a seminar at Auckland University on open research.

Ok, so it’s been a while since my last week report.

It’s always seemed strange to me that local broadcasters would hold off broadcasting Dr Who, Mad Men, and other high-profile shows.