Darren Shaw

Books I Enjoyed - Summer 2025 Sep 2025

  1. The Holiday - T.M. Logan I bought this in Tesco on a whim because I liked the cover and I’m susceptible to circular book club marketing stickers. I hoped it might be something like Saint X. It’s not. But it is a page turner and I finished it in three days.
  2. Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky I wouldn’t have bought this book if I knew it was going to be about giant space-traveling spiders. I was expecting a space drama like The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet but this is a book with something serious to say about AI, God, sexism, culture, global warming and pandemics. It was great.
  3. The Idea of You - Robinne Lee This book gets terrible reviews. People say it’s Harry Styles fan fiction (missing the more interesting Cheryl/Liam angle). I loved it. It was silly but so much fun. There’s a film version which Anne Hathaway is too beautiful and young-looking to make as interesting as the book.

Notes from 2025

Notes from 2019

Notes from 2018

Notes from 2017

Notes from 2016

Projects Photos

I Love Muted Tones

I've collected fashion and portrait pictures for years. I've got thousands. I have a good sense of what I like but what if I organise them by colour palette and model?

Algorithmic Twombly

My favourite things at the Louvre Abu Dhabi were Cy Twombly's Untitled I-IX paintings. They're structured but chaotic and beautifully imperfect.

Flow-vis for Net-A-Porter

What does a day's trading at Net-A-Porter look like? Taking inspiration from Formula 1's use of flow-vis paint, I came up with a visualisation for a YNAP hackday.

YNAP Hackday Poster

The most significant colours sampled from the product images of the top 1024 clothing products on Net-A-Porter, organised by hue.

Should Have Been Listening to Phoebe Bridgers

Spotify's Wrapped is very shareable but what if it took a longer term view? What if it considered the full thirteen years I've been with Spotify?

My Favourite Net-A-Porter Colour is Black

Net-A-Porter's Spring Summer 2022 marketing campaign, "Go for Bold", centred around a collection of colourful products. Marketing wanted to add a technology element and one idea was to use palettes as a route to finding products. Ultimately this was binned, but I built it anyway.

Has Roger Federer Perspired?

That Roger Federer does not sweat had become ingrained thinking, the sort of idea we were looking to challenge. Was it real or just a lazy cliche? We had IBM’s Wimbledon match data for all the top players and using Weather Underground we pulled in temperature data for those matches. This let us see the number of matches played by player and temperature.

Physical Web and Physical Meetings

As an experiment in using the Physical Web I wanted to create a voting system for physical meetings. A meeting would have a current question and attendees could vote with one click. There would be no entering URLs, downloading apps, or scanning QR codes.

Hello!

I'm Darren Shaw. I'm a software developer at Autotrader. Previously I worked at Zopa, Net-A-Porter and IBM. These are my side projects. Away from work I also play at being a portrait photographer.

Home | Email | LinkedIn | Instagram