Darren Shaw

Speed

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0100

Listening To

Paul Oakenfold’s Radio 1 Essential Mix, from Space, Ibiza. I realise I’m approximately 27 years late to this. My favourite bit is the Radiohead Street Spirit remix.
Kelly Lee Owens also uses a Radiohead remix (Everything In Its Right Place) in her Boiler Room, Manchester.
I came across ME N Ü on Instagram. I thought they may be AI only because they seem too perfectly targeted to me. Their Tomorrowland 2026 set sounds a lot like something Romy would do. If they are AI? Whatever.

Watching

Even the good 2020s action movies are pretty average. My favourite one from the ’90s is Speed. Keanu Reeves was so cool, Casio G-Shock and all. The engineering that went into filming the bus scenes is incredible. I love the bit where Sandra Bullock is driving the bus with a fake steering wheel, while the actual steering is done by a stunt driver on the roof.
Speed came out in 1994. Other films released that year: Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Leon, Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Mask. What was happening in 1994? If you didn’t want to go to the cinema you could have been home listening to Definitely Maybe, Dummy, Parklife, Illmatic or Music for the Jilted Generation instead.
While we’re in the 90s, Mark McNulty’s 35 Summers In Clubland pictures are moreish. Is it the heavy drinking? The smoking? Or just nostalgia that makes everyone in the 90s look so healthy?

Reading

Tim Harford’s Just how random is random? article on how humans can’t do random. We’ll pick heads more often. We’ll pick two-digit numbers where the first digit is larger than the second more often. We’re rubbish.
Training AI to Paint with Code. This is interesting. I thought it was going to be something that I’ve been playing with, using an AI to generate p5.js code to then generate an image (a two-step process that makes me feel like I’m contributing). But this is on another level. Surya Narreddi is using AI to generate p5.js code to generate an image which AI then uses to judge against a reference picture to refine the code it’s generating. It is subtle, but generating the code to generate the image and then improving the code to make the image better feels more impressive than going directly to an image. And it provides scope for the programmer/artist to contribute.
How to be less awkward. This will feel familiar to many computer nerds. It does to me. I admired many of the things about working with people in fashion. What I took as their confidence may have been an absolute lack of awkwardness.
Search Quality Evaluation With LLMs: The Dataset Generator. Nerdy Solr stuff that I’m thinking about in the context of my day job. Lots more work-related stuff happening with Solr and re-ranking. Apache Solr 10 – What Is New For Vector Search And LTR, New In Apache Solr 10: Improved Filtering In Vector Search With ACORN, Late Interaction Comes To Solr and Colbert Comes To Apache Solr.
Agentic Code Review. Code review is something I want to get better at. Everyone could. This made it more relevant and urgent.

There's Still Time

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 11:00:00 +0100

I’ve been reading about time. Christopher Butler wrote about his Fifteen Clocks. There’s an episode of The Rest Is Science in which Michael Stevens talks about his unusual clocks. I read Craftland, which has a chapter on Roger W. Smith, who makes handmade watches from scratch. Not from components, but from raw metal. Some of his watches take years to make.

I like the idea of showing the passage of time differently. This is my place to play.

Some people judge the quality of a watch by how smoothly the hands rotate. This is how you can distinguish a quartz from a mechanical movement. The only place I saw a smoothly rotating hand was on the pace clock at a public swimming pool.

Is it always darkest just before dawn?

There’s the crack of dawn, a false dawn, and the moment it dawns on someone. There are many sayings involving dawn or sunset. Every day has one sunrise and one sunset. They feel consistent, but of course they’re not. Even on the equator the length of the day changes through the year. In the North of the UK the change is tangible.

Is it teatime yet?

Sunset and sunrise may change throughout the year, but mealtimes don’t have to.

Do I Still Have Time?

I’m not squeamish about how much time I’ve got left. Statistics say I’ll live until I’m 85. They also say that I have less time ahead than behind me.

Days

In 2014 Wait But Why wrote a post about measuring your life in weeks and visualising it. Everyone (everyone who is a nerd) was talking about it. The article was based on the life of a typical American. I wanted to make it more personal and use days, not weeks.

Trying to add significant events, both personal and global, was surprising. How events and time relate to each other in my mind is not what they look like in reality. There are some events I’d like to place but I don’t know the specific date.

This is a work in progress. Playing with how to represent time is more interesting than I anticipated. Regular 12-hour clocks (e.g., ones that represent half a day) are an odd idea. It would have been more logical for a 360-degree rotation of the hour hand to map onto the Earth’s 360-degree rotation. Did 12-hour clocks come from sundials? There is a rabbit hole here.

Cindy Crawford

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:00:00 +0100

A lot of my favourite shoots for the last few years have been by Yulia Gorbachenko. I love her Cindy Crawford for Net-A-Porter shoot.

Alicia Silverstone from The '90s

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:00:00 +0100

I haven’t seen it for 30 years, but I have a vivid memory of this Alicia Silverstone picture. This was mid-90s. Clueless. Cher. Fake Plastic Trees. Whatever.

It was part of Carlo Dalla Chiesa’s Seventeen magazine shoot, though it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the set, which look more of their time. The Funkeesentials t-shirt would be popular today. Its ghost is still around in Stüssy.

Kylie Minogue

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 14:00:00 +0100

There are so many recent Lachlan Bailey shoots I love. They all have the same soft Summer colour tones. This time it’s Kylie for Vogue Australia. The I work nights t-shirt is fun. It’s sold out.

Lost Weekend

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:00:00 +0100

Listening To

Lost Weekend by Phoebe Bridgers. The album I was most looking forward to this year. I love it. Kill Me is my favourite track. It sounds like Fake Plastic Trees if it were sung by The Cranberries, which is the world I want to live in. Here’s the video for I Can’t Wait.

Reading

One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune. Prime beach read material. I read Every Summer After a couple of years ago and don’t remember anything about it other than it wasn’t as good as The Summer I Turned Pretty. One Golden Summer was so generic I kept trying to work out if I’ve somehow read it before. I’m really just looking for another Dawson’s Creek, The OC or Gossip Girl.
The Swedish Art of Ageing Well. This is an autobiography by a normal person who has obvious but sensible advice. I don’t know how it ever got published but it was charming and refreshing in its mundaneness.
Why play is the core of a meaningful life. It’s such a good read. The point of life is to play and it’s what still makes humans different to AI. The FT Weekend is £5.40. It’s the best money I spend every week (see two more references below).
Nested Vectors Search In Apache Lucene. Work related. Possible solution to handling multiple versions of embeddings we’ve been thinking about.
Don’t Outsource the Learning. There are so many Addy Osmani articles on AI I link to. I like the closing line of this one, I’ve started ending coding sessions with a simple question: did I learn anything today, or did I just close the issue?
Shaping Product Understanding with Contrastive Reinforcement Learning. Etsy have some good nerd content. Another (maybe) work-relevant one.
‘Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?’ How personal taste fell out of fashion. This Guardian article made me think of the people I worked with at Net-A-Porter who really knew fashion and curation. If you dismiss taste as trivial, or see it as purely imitative, you are dismissing what it is to be a person. Could this be related to Eugene Rabkin’s Is the luxury world stuck on repeat? (also in the FT Weekend)? If nobody curates their own style, how could fashion not be stuck?
The same issue of the FT Weekend had an article about On-Togther, a virtual co-working game/not-game. Which sounded a lot cuter and less nerdy than Second Life.
Dancing with friends and enemies. Swarming algorithms seem to be getting attention like it’s 2001 all over again.

Protect Your Shed

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0100

Listening To

Tranceport by Paul Oakenfold. The legal version keeps coming on and off streaming services, so I bought the second-hand CD. I still have CDs. This, and the original Trance Nation compilation are the best late 90s dance albums.
I bet Romy has the Tranceport and Trance Nation CDs. She has the best music taste. My favourite Boiler Room is Romy’s, but this Radio 1 Essential Mix is just as good. She’s better at picking what I want to listen to than Spotify’s AI. This mix includes Romy herself, Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Robyn, Mariah Carey, Everything But The Girl, Paramore, Ariana Grande, Ian Van Dahl, Rui Da Silva and even a few subtle bars of N-Trance.
Funkytone · Radio 1 Essential Mix 2025-12-13 Romy
Lainey Wilson. So much soul, so many hats. I love that she always looks like she’s come straight from the country version of 1998.

Watching

The Drama. I’ll watch anything with Zendaya. This film has a great setup. You think you’re watching a romantic comedy until the twist comes. I’m not sure how you’re meant to feel about Zendaya’s character. I imagine people will feel differently, but I was on her side.
Euphoria Season 3. Have you heard I’ll watch anything with Zendaya in it? Season 3 faced a lot of criticism and controversy. It’s not as good, or shocking, as the first two. But I love how beautifully made it is. Even films don’t look like films in 2026, but this is a TV series that still looks like a film.

This scene is brilliant. The colours are great, it’s styled perfectly, each cut uses the other characters as frames and there’s just so many layers and interactions going on. Look at how Rue, Maddy and Lexi crouch (or sit) down so that the frame works with Cassie and the leaf blower girl in the background. I love the bit where Maddy doesn’t say anything but gives Rue, Cassie and leaf blower different individual looks and then makes the start your engine sign. It’s a work of art.

Wearing

I keep reading about the 90s minimalism trend again and again. This is my favourite trend, but I’d prefer to see it in the real world than on the Internet.
I can’t find long shorts I like. If I were a woman and was spending £1000, these would be perfect.
All fashion magazines periodically do “my perfect white tee” articles. They always recommend Arket for quality, affordable options. Disagree. I’ve had three and they’ve all developed holes within months. The Uniqlo Supima cotton ones are much more robust.
Some of my favourite fashion images this year have been in the Financial Times How To Spend It weekend magazine. There’s nothing fancy about this Daniyel Lowden image of Bruna Souza but I love it.

Reading

I was on holiday this month and so I read quite a bit.

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. This has got a lot of criticism but it was fun. Think of Inception but about social media tradwives. There’ll be a film.
Down to Earth by Monty Don. Catching up on 40 years of missing gardening knowledge with books. What I’ll take from Monty Don is mainly, mulch.
How to Art by Kate Bryan. There are few books I find genuinely inspiring. This has been one of them. I’m now forever browsing Avant Arte and JEALOUS.
Craftland by James Fox. I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy this after the first couple of pages. Glad I kept going, I loved it.
The summer that changed me was in the FT’s Life & Arts weekend supplement. Listicles got a bad name in the 2010s for being an easy way to write clickbaity posts, a quaint concern looking back from 2026. This is a listicle done well. FT’s journalists write a couple of paragraphs about a significant summer memory. Insightful nonsense that I love.
The Factory Model: How Coding Agents Changed Software Engineering is similar to a lot of stuff written in the last year about software development and AI. But I enjoyed the new shape of high-leverage engineering section which lists the skills that continue to set the best engineers apart: systems thinking, problem decomposition, architectural judgement, specification clarity, output evaluation and orchestration skill. I’d add in product/problem understanding.
Japanese symbols that speak without words introduced me to the Ba no kuuki wo yomu which translates to understanding the situation without words. It’s where something happens and everyone just knows the correct way to respond.
I Could’ve Rickrolled the Entire FIFA World Cup because FIFA haven’t had enough drama this month.
Boosted K-Nearest Neighbour Search described exactly the problem we’re trying to tackle at work but then said there’s not really an answer.
Protect Your Shed. When I’ve worked in great development teams the engineers have always built their own sheds.
The Economics of Software Teams is a clear-sighted way of looking at software development, but I don’t think it captures the cost of day-to-day firefighting for a team running their software in the real world.

Lost Boys

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:00:00 +0100

Listening To

Lost Boys. If you don’t know already, I should have been listening to Phoebe Bridgers as she’s the best thing about the 2020s. The new song is great and has a video that could have been from late 90s MTV.

Even better is the live version she did with a backing band of kids. Glorious. Be a leader like Phoebe.
The second-best thing about the 2020s is Maggie Rogers. Surrender and Don’t Forget Me are both albums I listen to a lot, but I’ve only just come across this live version of Light On. Clever and joyful is a combination to aspire to.
Whenever I hear I Do This All The Time by Self Esteem I hear Sunscreen by Baz Lurman.

Looking At

Julie F Hill’s Through Machines & Darkness uses data to create art. In this case satellite data.
I’ve come across Train Jazz before. I lost just as much time playing with it the second time.
I’m a fan of Chris Guest’s Oil Paintings, they’re modern pinups that are as fun as they are glamorous. I love the consistency in the models he works with. And, although I’m biased, I do have a favourite.
Keith Tyson is another artist I follow and is always inspiring. His Generative Universe obviously looks awesome.

Reading

Consider Phlebas has been recommended to me multiple times. It’s 1980s sci-fi space opera revolving around AI. It was… okay.
AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. I’ve read the same article so many times that it’s taken me six months to get to this instantiation of it and I almost didn’t bother. But it did raise a point that you can’t (at least in the US) copyright AI generated content, which means companies (e.g. Disney) can’t use it because they’d have to give Avengers: Bring It On Again Too Fast Too Furious 2033 away for free. What? Interesting.
Hybrid Search With Reciprocal Rank Fusion In Apache Solr. A deep cut for people who work with Solr. I think there’s something clever that could be done with this to combine different types of searches that all contribute to a page on an e-commerce or marketplace site.
Fifteen Clocks. This is the sort of post I really love. Made me think about measuring time in a whole different way and inspired me to start playing.

Penélope Cruz

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0100

I am biased, but I still think Net-A-Porter make some of the best fashion images. I love every picture from their Penélope Cruz shoot.

Gillian Anderson for Hollywood Authentic

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0100

My favourite photographer is Peter Lindbergh. Among the many things I love about his pictures is that he didn’t try to make his subjects look younger than they were. He just photographed people in the most natural and beautiful way (see his 2017 Pirelli Calendar for example). Greg Williams’ pictures of Gillian Anderson are different, but they still remind me of Lindbergh.