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I keep wondering how much further Google will need to go in order to trigger Amazon going all-in on their Vega OS.

When talking to companies about my next adventure, and the idea of Hybrid working occasionally comes up, and one of the most illuminating questions I try to ask is “Why?”

After a month of digging into AI I’m developing some more solid views, and it’s a very nuanced situation.

I’m pretty impressed by the 20 billion parameter gpt-oss model as a code reviewer.

This interview gives me some hope that AI will not be the climate disaster that folk think it could be, if we extrapolated the current power and usage trends.

Today is my last day at Snapp Automotive.

It always makes me smile when I see the moment that a project manager/scrum master/team lead realises that you can run a project using software algorithms, and not just follow a book.

If you thought Google was achieving anything in relation to reducing carbon emissions, read pages 80-82 of their 2025 environmental report.

I’m always puzzled as to why many purchasing departments don’t understand that software engineers are not fungible assets.

I’ve recently been playing with Artificial Intelligence and large language models, and there’s a trajectory that I’ve not seen widely discussed; Local AIs.

One of the clearest signs, to me, that a business is in trouble, is when processes need to be worked around because they don’t align with what’s needed for product development.

I’ve spent a few hours over the last couple of nights looking at installing a Mastodon server, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be designed to scale, so I can understand why folk are having a rough ride atm.

If you are wondering if the claims about Twitter security being lax is just one person complaining, you might be interested to know that, 18 months after being let go from the company, I had still not been removed from their employees GitHub committers gr…

I had an interesting, and long, chat with someone who has as much experience with teaching as I have with computers.

I was tempted by an m2 Mac Air to test the arm64 Apple Silicon emulators we’ve been building at Snapp Automotive.

This Android OS code looks, to me, like it’s been written by folk who absolutely believe Enums don’t have a place in code, but a 300+ line switch/case statement is just fine.

So having spent last week doing a 700+ mile trip across the UK (east to west) with some stop offs, I can now understand why using a Tesla gives folk confidence in an EV-only future.

I’ve seen another loop of the “all coders should be paid the same!”

There’s been an increasing trend in Stock/Share Options, RSUs, and employee share purchase schemes, some of which are hyped up to give the impression that they’re worth more than your base salary.

Google recently release Android 13 (T) Developer Preview 1, and, while there are times when a lot of noise is made about Android being “Open Source”, what gets pushed to the Android Open Source Project for developer previews gives us some signals on how t…

After an attempt to do a 170 mile round trip in my Nissan Leaf, it has now been consigned to a life of “less than 100-mile total distance” trips only.

After driving traditional combustion engine cars for more years that I care to mention I decided to take the plunge into the world of EVs.

Having been a mobile ‘phone owner for more than a couple of decades, and recently “upgrading” to a Pixel 6 due to my old Pixel 3 going out of the security update support, I have to say I’m disappointed with where we’re at with Android phones.

Recently I saw this tweet which advocates for something I consider a dangerous development practice; Not fixing your builds to a version of its dependencies.

As part of my work at Snapp Automotive I’ve been helping create tools and process to make Android Automotive OS development easier.

Over the weekend Gergely Orosz tweeted about “Promotion Driven Development”, which is a problem in many large tech companies, and is tightly coupled with one of my least favourite concepts from my time in large tech; Whether everything you do is “Level Wo…

Today I’ve submitted a patch to the AOSP to continue something which was probably, externally, one of the least popular things I did while I was at Google; Start eradicating adb backup support from Android devices.

Occasionally I get asked “How do I make my own Android build?”.

Being able to push a change to a server which builds and tests it can free you up to do other things, but getting the machines together to create a build farm for any large build can be expensive.

I’ve seen a number of different approaches to building programs, and between writing about the specifications of an Android firmware build machine, and how to create a cost-effective build farm, I thought it’d be worth covering a few things that I believe…

Most commodity desktop computers won’t be able to build the Android Open Source Project in less than 4 hours, and most folk are on a budget when they build a new machine, so I’ve put together a few tips which will help you build a machine capable of build…

Buying disks has, if anything, become more confusing recently.

Many CI systems allow you to build inside a Docker container, but creating the docker image which is used for the container can be a slow process.

With JCenter closing down folks are looking at alternative places to host their build artifacts, and AWS can easily meet that need.

12 days after being told by my EM it could happen, something I’ve been expecting to happen for a few weeks has finally happened.

Ideas for a healthier engineering environment We’ve all had good and bad work experiences, but how many of us are learning from them?

The problem with RSS and feeds I like RSS as a concept, but, where I’ve seen it used, it’s always felt like it’s missing one thing; the ability to dynamically limit the audience of some posts.

My first experience of Commuting into London was nearly two decades ago.

Something I’ve seen over the (several) years I’ve been working in tech is a lack of understanding that feedback has differing levels of value.

The idea Currently most build systems have two sources for build dependencies; A remotely hosted source (e.g. maven central, internal build cache on a server), or a local on-disk cache, but many development groups have another potential source which doesn…

Some of those who know me may have heard me talk about an Enterprise Password Safe product which I built and worked on from the mid-2000’s up until shortly before joining Facebook.

A few weeks ago I tweeted to see if anyone had put a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a PaPiRus eInk display together to make a Bitcoin Wallet.

The biggest concern I have over the UK Tax authority (HMRC) and digital “currencies” is that they don’t seem to understand digital delivery, which already hurts UK businesses.

We need competition for “Google” Android.

I had an interesting conversation with an ‘phone OEM at Droidcon NL which gave me a good idea as to why there may be very few OEMs making money producing ‘phones.

There’s a fine line between user security and blocking modders, but the thing to remember is that far far far more users will benefit from enhanced security than will ever install a custom ROM, and so making a change which can block malware modifying the…

With the beta of the Droidcon NL 2013 app Quirijn Groot Bluemink posted a screenshot which showed a small problem; The menu provided by ShareActionProvider as part of the Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar has black text on a dark grey background.

It seems Google is getting in on the “promote via bloat-ware” game which is not great for users, like me, who don’t use a lot of Google services.

Occasionally I look over the OUYA website, and today it had a nice looking number in the top right.

In a G+ post comment I made a statement about how the closed-source components are detrimental to those OEMs who don’t sign up to the Google agreement for the GApps, and here’s an example; In JellyBean Google has starting giving approved OEMs Chrome as the