Mark Phillips | Product Marketing, Management and Strategy

Only yesterday I had a grumble about Apple tricking me into upgrading my iPhone and iPad to iOS 26, despite my efforts to avoid it.

I am fuming.

I’ve cancelled my Claude Pro subscription.

John Gruber has been dropping some bangers this week.

“Don’t make me think”.

Matt Shumer’s “Something Big is Happening” blog post about AI has caused quite a stir.

I don’t mind admitting, I am an unashamed Apple fan.

I started meditating many years ago, initially discounting it as ‘woo-woo’.

Over the 28 years this website has existed, it’s gone through various iterations with many tools to build it.

Whilst rummaging around in a large box of cables (you’ve got one of those too, haven’t you?)

I wanted to save this somewhere I wouldn’t forget about it.

TL;DR I built a web application using Go, HTMx and TailwindCSS using Claude Code.

Last year I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with trying to add timecode to every camera I film with.

Well that’s irksome.

I’ll admit that most of my LLM use is for coding help.

Years ago I used to aggregate all my interesting blogs and sites in an RSS reader.

Things by Cultured Code is the best app I own.

When Apple Maps was first released it was terrible.

1Password is a good password manager, relatively speaking.

You’ve most likely heard the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none”.

I used to quite enjoy writing regexs. man perlre is one’s friend.

Something a little bit different to the usual things I write about here.

Along with ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, I’d recommend How Minds Change as essential reading.

I may have ‘retired’ from being a techie a long time ago, but I haven’t stopped solving little day-to-day problems in a shell 😊 So like any self-respecting nerd, whether old or young, one needs a good prompt.

I decided to try and save some space in my iCloud drive.

Taking screenshots on macOS is a doddle. cmd-shift-4, or cmd-shift-3, or for ultimate control, cmd-shift-5.

Jumping on the default apps bandwagon, I thought I’d share how ‘default’ I am (is this the’normcore’ of macOS application use?)

Elaine Moore recently wrote an article in the FT titled “We might be surprised by our reactions to generative AI”.

After my desk recently featured on Workspaces, its curator, Ryan, mentioned that several people had asked about the teleprompter set up I use for video meetings.

I am of the age that means I was the second year to sit GCSEs (after GCE O-Levels were abandoned).

“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”.

Why pay for something that you can get for free?

In a word, yes.

What should be simple has this week turned out to be anything but.

I’ve been moving email off of Google recently to the excellent service by Hey.

I’ve spent most of the last decade working from home.

“Good storytelling never gives you four, it gives you two plus two… Don’t give the audience the answer, give them the pieces and let them conclude the answer” Have you ever read a Michael Lewis book?

“Things are not what they are; they are what we think they are” My wife is a cryptic crossword fan, and she’s very good at them.

Loonshot: a widely dismissed idea whose champions are often written off as crazy.

“Figuring out how to build a sustainable culture … wasn’t a singular assignment.

“The world makes much less sense than you think.

“The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.”

When patching Linux machines these days I could forgive you for asking “how hard can it be?”

At a recent Ansible London Meetup I was chatting with somebody about automated hardware builds.

It’s been a few months since I sold my trusty MacBook and bought an iPad Pro, with the idea of performing all mobile compute on the latter.

“Just type this invoice up for me will you please?”

On October 7th I gave a talk at the IPExpo show about getting from legacy IT to the modern idea of DevOps.

At an Ansible meetup last week somebody put this question to me: “I’m coming from the Puppet world, and there they have whole structures around testing modules (the same thing as Ansible roles) like Rspec.

In May of 2015 I gave a talk about automation at the IPExpo Manchester show.

There are lots of ways to enable self-service VMs within an organisation - what some might call ‘a private cloud’.