Darren Shaw

Software Engineering Reading Feb 2026

Technology

  1. Tech Predictions for 2026 and Beyond. The sort of writing Wired used to do at the intersection of technology and the real world. I read these predictions every year.
  2. For my 80th birthday I bought myself a new brain. 80-year-old experimenting on his own brain. Good stuff.

Development

  1. OpenTelemetry with Spring Boot. Covers the difficult part about maintaining MDC context when switching threads.
  2. Architecture Patterns for Reliable Event-Driven Systems. Useful summary of the problems you eventually come across when working on event-based systems. We used this as the basis of an Architecture Kata at work.
  3. Handling Exceptions in Kafka Streams, Effect of Idempotence on the Performance of a Kafka Producer and Event-Driven Architecture Patterns. Also related to above.
  4. Why Use the Returned Instance of Spring Data JPA Repository’s save() Call. Or why JPA can cause more trouble than it’s worth.

Work

  1. On Factory Tours. I love a factory tour; it reminded me of school trips to Sellafield.
  2. Signals for 2026. Generalists, or in this case “product builder” comes up year after year. We often use “full-stack” in an engineering-only context; it should be about solving a user’s problem.

AI

It’s hard to read about AI because there’s so much noise and hype. Here are some things I’ve read that I think are worthwhile.

  1. Tech CEOs don’t seem to realise just how anti-human their AI fanaticism is from PC Gamer.
  2. What the computerisation of Wall Street can teach us about AI from O’Reilly.
  3. Teaching Large Language Models to Speak Spotify. There’s a lot of good content on Spotify’s blog.

Notes from 2026

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