Darren Shaw

Software Engineering Reading - February Feb 2026

Technology

  1. Exploiting McDonald’s APIs is an old post I’ve been meaning to read. Security vulnerability posts are often a bit dry, but this is a fun adventure in abusing APIs to get free McDonald’s.
  2. The Story of Creative Technology. Everyone who had a PC in the late 90s will be familiar with Creative’s Sound Blaster. It’s a company that has a very specific place in time.
  3. While I’m feeling nostalgic, Deluxe Paint on the Commodore Amiga is another way to reminisce about 90s computing.
  4. Software Defined Radio is something I want to play with. This is an inspirational article on what you might do with it.
  5. The Toy Story You Remember. There are lots of interesting things about the cross-over period between analogue and digital. This article is all about the colouring in the original Toy Story and why it looks weird now.

Development

  1. Handling Exceptions in Kafka. Not exciting but easy to get wrong and a good reference.
  2. Unexpected Things that are People. Lovely article about edge cases (or corner cases as I keep hearing people say).
  3. Craft software that makes people feel something. So many people reference The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in so many different contexts.

AI

  1. Everyone has been reading and discussing Something Big Is Happening. It sounds feasible. The advice is good regardless of where AI goes (be good at learning new things). But it is another “this time it’s different” article. I remember reading this Wired article about autonomous vehicles about to bring in the end of trucking as an accessible middle class job in the US. That was ten years ago, and it’s as far away now as it was then. Maybe this will be different. Maybe it won’t.

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